Conversational implicature:
Consolidation exercises
Shaozhong Liu, Ph.D. (Pragmatics) /
Ph.D. (Higher Education)
School of Foreign Studies,
Guilin University of Electronic Technology
Homepage: www.gxnu.edu.cn/Personal/szliu
Blog: cyrusliu.blog.163.com
Email: shaozhong@hotmail.com
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Terms
• Implicature
• Conventional / general conversational implicature
• Particular / particularized conversational
implicature
• Cooperation
• Principle
• Maxim
• Violating
• Flouting
• Mutual knowledge
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Types of implicature and degree of
background knowledge dependence
• There are basically 2 types of implicature:
general / conventional convensational
implicature and particular / particularized
conversational implicature.
• Their difference lies in the degree of
background knowledge dependence in
inferring the speaker meaning: Normally the
former needs less than the latter.
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Definite vs. indefinite knowledge
• Articles, possessives, demonstratives, etc. may
indicate levels of certainty or definiteness of
inference.
• Most people may infer the following without
more contextual information or effort. E.g.:
1) Carmen: Did you get the milk and the eggs?
Dave: I got the milk.
Did Dave buy the eggs? (Like in TOEFL listening
test!)
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2) Carmen: Did you manage to fix that leak?
Dave: I tried to.
Did Dave fix the leak?
3) Faye: I hear you’ve invited Mat and Chris.
Ed: I didn’t invite Mat.
Did Ed invite Chris?
4) Steve: What happened to your flowers?
Jane: A dog got into the garden.
Did the dog belong to Jane?
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5) Jane: Who used all the printer paper?
Steve: I used some of it.
6) Jane: I hear you’ve always late with the rent.
Steve: Well, sometimes I am.
7) Jane: Mike and Annie should be here by now.
Was their plane late?
Steve: Possibly.
8) Jane: This cheese looks funny. The label said
to store it in a cool place.
Steve: Yeah, I did.
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Hedges and scalar implicature
• Words like “some”, “all”, maybe”, “possibly”,
“late” etc. are vague in meaning.
• In conversations, such words may give rise to
levels of implicature, hence scalar implicature.
• Scale of quantity: some, most, all
• Scale of frequency: sometimes, often, always
• Scale of coldness: cool, cold, freezing
• Scale of likelihood: possbily, probably, certainly
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• Normally, we assume, following the cooperative
principle, that, where speakers have a scale of
values at their disposal, they will choose the one
that is truthful (maxim of quality) and optionally
informative (maxim of quantity).
• And normally we draw the implicature “not any
of the higher values on the scale.”
• Such drawn implicatures do not require an extra
knowledge to extract the meaning, hence
generalized conversational implicatures.
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Implicature requiring extra background
knowledge in inference
9) Tom: Are you going to Mark’s party tonight?
Annie: My parents are in town. (No)
10) Tom: Where’s the salad dressing?
Gabriela: We’ve run out of olive oil. (There
isn’t any salad dressing)
11) Steve: What’s with your mother?
Jane: Let’s go into the garden. (I can’t talk
about it here)
12) Mat: Want some fudge brownies?
Chris: There must be 20,000 calories there. (No)
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Cancelling presuppositions or implicatures
• Cancelling an existential presupposition:
Mike: What happened?
Annie: Steve’s dog wrecked the garden – and in
fact, Steve doesn’t have a dog.
• Cancelling a lexical presupposition:
Mike: What’s up?
Annie: I’ve stopped smoking – although I’ve never
smoked.
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• Cancelling a generalized implicature:
Mike: What’s happened to the shampoo?
Annie: I used most of it – actually, I used all of it.
• Cancelling a particularized implicature:
Mike: Are you coming to the party?
Annie: My parents are in town – but I am
coming.
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Now you try your hands on the
cancellation exercise:
1) Linda: What’s with Jean?
Jen: She discovered that her central heating’s
broken.
(Her central heating is broken.)
2) Terry: How do you like your bath?
Phil: Warm.
(I don’t like it hot.)
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3) Annie: What do you think of this necklace and
bracelet?
Mike: The bracelet is beautiful.
(The necklace is not beautiful.)
4) Lois: Has the kitchen been painted?
Gabriela: Tom’s away. (No.)
5) Jane: Have you seen my sweater?
Steve: There’s a sweater on the sofa.
(It’s not Steve’s sweater.)
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6) Mike: How come Mary’s all dressed up?
Annie: We’re going to the D-E-N-T-I-S-T.
(Annie hates the dentist.)
7) Austin: It works now.
Barbara: When did Eric fix it?
(Eric fixed it.)
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Inference in brackets:
presupposition or implicature?
1) Mike: I heard about the mess.
Dave: Yeah, Steve really regrets sending that email. (Steve sent that e-mail.)
2) Patric: I didn’t take it.
Virginia: Why do you always lie? (You always lie.)
3) Doris: Did Carmen like the party?
Dave: She left after an hour. (She didn’t like the
party.)
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4) Mat: How did you do on those exams?
Chris: I failed physics. (I didn’t fail the others.)
5) Reporter: Senator, what is the present state
of your marriage?
Senator: Well, we, I think have been able to
make some very good progress and it’s – I would
say that it’s – it’s – it’s delightful that we’re able
to – to share the time and the relationship that
we – that we do not share. (The marriage is not
in good state.)
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6) Steve: Did you buy the car?
Ed: It cost twice as much as I thought it
would. (Ed didn’t buy the car.)
7) Maggie: The bathroom’s flooded!
James: Someone must have left the tap on. (It
wasn’t James who left the tap on.)
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Hyponym, super-ordinate, and
implicature
Hyponym
rose
salmon
hammer
jeep
China
Guilin
Lingui
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Super-ordinate
flower
fish
tool
automobile
country
city
county
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1) Mike: Did you buy her a rose?
Annie: I bought her a flower.
2) Jane: There’s salmon on the menu.
Steve: I don’t like fish.
3) Ed: Be careful of that sofa.
Meridyth: It’s a piece of furniture, Dad.
4) Mat: so you’ve taken up teaching?
Chris: It’s a job.
5) Mary: I want to divorce you.
Mike: No way.
6) Mary: I want to divorce you.
Mike: Sean is only 2.
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7) Mary: It’s time that we get divorced.
Mike: That’s a stupid idea.
8) Mary: I want to divorce you.
Mike: Anyway.
9) Mary: I want to divorce you.
Mike: Don’t ever regret over your decision.
10) Mary: I want to divorce you.
Mike: It that your idea?
11) Mary: I want to divorce you.
Mike: Are you really serious?
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Conjunctions and implicature
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
Tom stayed and Mark left.
Tom stayed but Phil stayed too.
Stop that or I’ll leave.
Do you want milk or juice?
She’ll stay unless you return before 10.
I’ll join you for the dinner if you can make it
in Wei Dao Zhi Zao.
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Summary
• We have further discussed 2 types of
conversational implicatures: generalized and
particularized.
• Generalized implicatures can be drawn with very
little “inside” knowledge. If you heard a tape
recording of the conversation but knew nothing
about the participants or the physical
characteristics of the context, you could still draw
those implicatures. They are closely connected to
the degree of informativeness that we normally
expect a speaker’s utterance to prove.
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• Scalar implicatures are a special type of generalized
implicature where the inference is made by reference
to a scale of values, one of which has been chosen by
the speaker. The speaker’s choice implicates ‘not the
higher values’.
• Particularized implicatures require not only general
knowledge but also knowledge which is particular or
‘local’ to the speaker and the hearer, and often to the
physical context of the utterance as well.
• Both generalized and particularized implicatures differ
from presuppositions in that they sound much less
contradictory when they are cancelled by the speaker.
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• Grice’s work was an important first step in
systematically examining how hearers work to
derive the ultimate message from the words that
are actually uttered. He recognized that, of all the
maxims, relevance was probably the most
important, although he never really tackled the
issue of how speakers and hearers actually assign
relevance to particular pieces of information.
• Sperber and Wilson have carried this work
forward by looking even more systematically at
the various kinds of inferencing that take place in
normal convergence. They suggest that all four
maxims can be subsumed under relevance.
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