Comprehending Speaker Meaning

Abstract

This paper reviews research on the comprehension of speaker meaning. The starting point for this review is Grice’s (1975) theory of conversational implicature, an extremely heuristic approach but one that is incomplete in several respects. The present review centers on the processes that are involved in the generation of conversational implicatures, and the specific inferences that recipients will tend to generate. In terms of processing, research suggests that the comprehension of implicatures varies as a function of implicature type (particularized vs. generalized), utterance conventionality, and relative status. For particularized implicatures (e.g., violations of the relevance maxim) the specific implicature that is generated is based on a process whereby the recipient reasons about why the violation occurred. Because face management is a major motive for speaking indirectly, it will play a parallel role in the interpretation of speaker meaning. Individual, cultural, and perspective differences in the interpretive process, and the possibility that conversational maxims may provide a framework for understanding the generation of unintended inferences, are considered as well.