Implicature

Implicature, as Paul Grice defined it in his landmark 1967 William James Lectures, is the component of meaning that a speaker communicates beyond the literal content of the words used. When a professor writes a reference letter saying only that a candidate's English is excellent and attendance regular, the implication that the candidate is no good at philosophy is not in the words. It is inferred by the reader, who reasons that a cooperative writer with more to say is communicating something by conspicuously not saying it. When someone says “some of the guests have arrived,” the implication that not all have arrived is not logically entailed by the sentence but is reliably conveyed. Implicature is not an occasional rhetorical device but the normal condition of human communication: we constantly mean more than we say, and listeners constantly and automatically recover the surplus. Grice showed that this recovery runs through a specific mechanism—inference about a cooperative speaker's communicative intentions—which he organized