Conversational Implicature Essay

CHAPTER II
THEORETICAL REVIEW
2.0 Preliminaries
The present chapter aims at offering a theoretical foundation to the present study. A light has been thrown on the concepts in Pragmatics such as implicature, co-operative principle, and politeness principle on which the present study is based. Moreover, it studies the concept of implicature, its types- conventional, conversational and the sub-types minutely. In addition to this, properties of implicature and problematic cases for conversational implicature have also been taken into account with suitable illustrations. The chapter discusses, in detail, the co-operative principle, its maxims and sub-maxims with examples, which show how observance and violation of maxims generate conversational

They are:
1. Non-cancellability: Conventional implicatures are commitments, and give rise to entailments, though separate from the ‘at-issue’ entailments of a sentence.
2. Conventionality: Conventional implicatures are by definition part of the conventional meaning of a word or construction.
3. Detachability: Most conventional implicatures are detachable, since they come from specific words or instructions and not just from the truth conditional content of what is said. So substituting a semantically equivalent word or expression can result in changing conventional implicatures.
4. Speaker-orientation: The commitments made via conventional implicatures are made by the speaker of the utterance, and except in special circumstances remain ‘speaker-oriented’ even when embedded.
5. Independence from at-issue meaning: Conventional implicatures are logically and compositionally independent of at-issue meaning.
6. Behavior under Negation: Since conventional implicatures are independent from at-issue meaning, and are (almost) always ‘speaker oriented’, they normally survive under negation, in if-clauses,

Tom: My parents are visiting.
[2] Ann: Where are you going with the dog? Sam: To the V-E-T. (Yule 43)
The above examples require special contextual knowledge to make out hidden meaning of Tom and Sam’s expressions. Why Tom and Sam used those utterances can only be explained by relating them to the context in which they are used. The expressions violate maxim of relevance and maxim of manner respectively.
Scalar Implicature
The next type of conversational implicature is scalar implicature. These implicatures are derived out of the use of words form set of words which show scalar value. Words like ‘all’, ‘few’, ‘some’, ‘most’, ‘something’, and ‘nothing’ show additional scalar value when they are used in specific context. How these words provide additional meaning can be illustrated as below:
1. All of the boys went to the Party.
2. Some of the boys went to the Party. (Levinson 133)
The users, while talking, appropriately select the words which are most informative and truthful. In the above examples, the words all and some indicate not some and not all respectively. These inferences can be drawn regarding the two examples or vice versa. In this way implicature can be drawn on the basis of scale provided by these