Conversational Implicature

Abstract

The theory of conversational implicature originates from Gricean pragmatics, involving concepts of the cooperative principle, maxims of conversation and their properties, to generalized and particularized implicatures, among others. The theory’s originator, Paul Grice, delivered his ideas at the William James lectures at Harvard University in 1967. This revolutionized the direction of pragmatics and opened new frontiers of research in linguistics and beyond. The theory of conversational implicature, a cornerstone of Grice’s thinking, aims to capture how language is used in communication to maximum effect while being efficient as possible. Since Grice’s proposal, a new generation of Gricean theorists has advanced the theory, while others have taken issue with Gricean explanations and moved to create other theoretical models of meaning, such as Relevance theory. Overall, this article is separated into two distinct parts. The first part is a review of Gricean theory and its evolution into the neo-Gricean framework, with a selection of key articles and books. This is followed by an overview of post-Gricean approaches, theories that compete with Gricean conversational implicature. The second part of the article attempts to bring together the wide-ranging applications of conversational implicature to different fields. This not only includes linguistics and its subfields but also areas such as business and literature.