The Role of Conversational Implicature in Daily Conversations – What Matters, Content or Context?

Abstract

In daily conversation, sometimes dialogue includes terms that vary entirely from the common phrases. From a linguistic perspective, the conversational implicatures are the speaker's intended meaning of the utterance. Conversation implications are the specific conversations between the speaker and the receiver by following the communications principles. It is the most significant component that has undergone argumentation in conversation theory. Grice's theory of dialogue inference is the possibility of providing meaning to the literal. In other words, people apply certain cooperative principles to communicate cooperatively. Thus, conversational implicatures have become one of the top research areas in pragmatics. This paper intends to explore the importance of conversational implicatures in day-to-day conversations in various contexts. It focuses on certain dialogues collected and integrated from the routine conversation. The outcome revealed that context plays a vital role in interpreting utterances. Therefore, there is no possibility of a complete correspondence of one utterance to one context, which shows the conversational implicature cannot be context-independent. In addition, dialogues were classified into Generalized, Scalar, and Particular conversational implicatures.