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IMPLICATURE

> Suppose that A and B are talking about a mutual friend, C, who is now working
> in a bank. A asks B how C is getting on in his job, and B replies, Oh quite
> well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been to prison yet. At
> this point, A might well inquire what B was implying, what he was suggesting,
> or even what he meant by saying that C had not yet been to prison. The answer
> might be any one of such things as that C is the sort of person likely to
> yield to the temptation provided by his occupation, that C’s colleagues are
> really very unpleasant and treacherous people, and so forth. It might, of
> course, be quite unnecessary for A to make such an inquiry of B, the answer to
> it being, in the context, clear in advance. It is clear that whatever B
> implied, suggested, meant in this example, is distinct from what B said, which
> was simply that C had not been to prison yet. I wish to introduce, as terms of
> art, the verb implicate and the related nouns implicature (cf. implying) and
> implicatum (cf. what is implied). The point of this maneuver is to avoid
> having, on each occasion, to choose between this or that member of the family
> of verbs for which implicate is to do general duty.
> —H. P. Grice, Logic and Conversation, 1975 (Based on lectures from 1967)

Note that the noun implicatum never caught on – even Grice didn’t use it
systematically – and that the noun implicature does double-duty both for the
phenomenon of implicating and for a proposition that is implicated.


EISS 13

implicature.xyz is also the home of the site for the preparation of the volume
Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 13 (EISS 13), a.k.a. the volume for
CSSP 2019, edited by Christopher Pinon and Laurent Roussarie, completed in 2020.