Implicatures: a schematic approach

Abstract

Grice's theory of implicatures is still considered one of the most valuable descriptions of conversational logic. However, when it comes to specifying how persons reason from the content of an uttered proposition to some other proposition it implicates, Grice is vague. If implicatures were actually that open-ended and indeterminate, reliably communicating something “off the record,” indirectly, by means of what one implicates, would be impossible. This paper proposes to develop a solution that grounds the calculation of implicatures in Greimas' [Greimas, A.J., 1987. On Meaning. Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (Perron, Paul J., Collins, Frank H., Transl.). Francis Pinter, London; Greimas, A.J., 1990. The Social Science: A Semiotic View (Perron, Paul, Collins, Frank H., Transl.). University of Minneapolis Press, Minneapolis, MI] model of narrative. Based on a semio-narrative approach to indirectness [Cooren, F., Taylor, J.R., 2000. Association and dissociation in an ecological controversy: the great whale case. In: Coppola, N.W., Karis, B. (Eds.), Technical communication, Deliberative Rhetoric, and Environmental Discourse: Connections and Directions. Ablex, Stamford, CT, pp. 171–190] and Sanders' [Sanders, R.E., 1987. Cognitive Foundations of Calculated Speech: Controlling Understandings in Conversation and Persuasion. State University of New York Press, Albany, NY] model of calculated speech, we show that the general mechanism of implicatures, as first introduced by Grice [Grice, H.P., 1975. Logic and conversation. In: Cole, P., Morgan, J.L. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3. Academic Press, New York, pp. 41–58; Grice, H.P., 1989a. Further notes on logic and conversation. In: Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 41–57; Grice, H.P., 1989b. Logic and conversation. In: Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 22–40], can be operationalized by mobilizing schemata that were devised to explore the universal forms of narratives.