In pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics, an implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed. Implicatures can aid in communicating more efficiently than by explicitly saying everything we want to communicate. The philosopher H. P. Grice coined the term in 1975. Grice distinguished conversational implicatures, which arise because speakers are expected to respect general rules of conversation, and conventional ones, which are tied to certain words such as but or therefore. Take for example the following exchange:
A (to passerby): I am out of gas. B: There is a gas station 'round the corner. Here, B does not say, but conversationally implicates, that the gas station is open, because otherwise his utterance would not be relevant in the context. Conversational implicatures are classically seen as contrasting with entailments: they are not necessary or logical consequences of what is said, but are defeasible (cancellable). So, B could continue without contradiction:
B: But unfortunately it's closed today. An example of a conventional implicature is "Donovan is poor but happy", where the word but implicates a sense of contrast between being poor and being happy. Later linguists introduced and refined different definitions of the term, leading to somewhat different ideas about which parts of the information conveyed by an utterance are actually implicatures and which are not.
Conversational implicature Grice was primarily concerned with conversational implicatures. Like all implicatures, these are part of what is communicated. In other words, conclusions the addressee draws from an utterance although they were not actively conveyed by the communicator are never implicatures. According to Grice, conversational implicatures arise because communicating people are expected by their addressees to obey the maxims of conversation and the overarching cooperative principle, which basically states that people are expected to communicate in a cooperative, helpful way.
Standard implicatures The simplest situation is where the addressee can draw conclusions from the assumption that the communicator obeys the maxims, as in the following examples. The symbol "+>" means "implicates".
Quality It is raining. +> I believe, and have adequate evidence, that it is raining. Moore's paradox, the observation that the sentence "It is raining, but I don't believe that it is raining" sounds contradictory although it is not from a strictly logical point of view, has been explained as a contradiction to this type of implicature. However, as implicatures can be cancelled (see below), this explanation is dubious.
Quantity (i) A well-known class of quantity implicatures are the scalar implicatures. Prototypical examples include words specifying quantities such as some, few, or many:
John ate some of the cookies. +> John didn't eat all of the cookies. Here, the use of some semantically entails that more than one cookie was eaten. It does not entail, but implicates, that not every cookie was eaten, or at least that the speaker does not know whether any cookies are left. The reason for this implicature is that saying some when one could say all would be less than informative enough in most circumstances. The general idea is that the communicator is expected to make the strongest possible claim, implicating the negation of any stronger claim. Lists of expressions that give rise to scalar implicatures, sorted from strong to weak, are known as Horn scales:
all, many, some, few ..., four, three, two, one (cardinal number terms) always, often, sometimes and, or necessarily, possibly hot, warm etc. Negation reverses these scales, as in this example:
She won't necessarily get the job. +> She will possibly get the job. "Not possibly" is stronger than "not necessarily", and the implicature follows from the double negation "She will not [not possibly] get the job". Here are some further implicatures that can be classified as scalar:
I slept on a boat yesterday. +> The boat was not mine. This is a common construction where the indefinite article indicates that the referent is not closely associated with the speaker, because the stronger claim "I slept on my boat yesterday" is not made.
The flag is green. +> The flag is completely green. If this is the strongest possible claim, it follows that the flag has no other features, because "The flag is green and some other colour" would be stronger. In other words, if it did contain other features, this utterance would not be informative enough.
Quantity (ii) The second quantity maxim seems to work in the opposite direction as the first; the communicator makes a weaker claim, from which a stronger one is implicated. Implicatures arising from this maxim enrich the information contained in the utterance:
He drank a bottle of vodka and fell into a stupor. +> He drank a bottle of vodka and consequently fell into a stupor. I lost a book yesterday. +> The book was mine. There is extensive literature, but no consensus on the question which of the two quantity maxims is in operation in which circumstances; i.e. why "I lost a book yesterday" implicates that the book was the speaker's, while "I slept on a boat yesterday" usually implicates that the boat wasn't the speaker's.
Relation/relevance That cake looks delicious. +> I would like a piece of that cake. This statement taken by itself would be irrelevant in most situations, so the addressee concludes that the speaker had something more in mind. The introductory example also belongs here:
A: I am out of gas. +> I need to get gas. B: There is a gas station 'round the corner. +> The gas station is open. Manner (iv) The cowboy jumped on his horse and rode into the sunset. +> The cowboy performed these two actions in this order. Being orderly includes relating events in the order they occurred.
Clashes of maxims Sometimes it is impossible to obey all maxims at once. Suppose that A and B are planning a holiday in France and A suggests they visit their old acquaintance Gérard:
A: Where does Gérard live? B: Somewhere in the South of France. +> B does not know where exactly Gérard lives. B's answer violates the first maxim of quantity as it does not contain sufficient information to plan their route. But if B does not know the exact location, she cannot obey this maxim and also the maxim of quality; hence the implicature.
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