Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The aspect of meaning that a speaker conveys, implies, or suggests without directly expressing. Although the utterance “Can you pass the salt?” is literally a request for information about one's ability to pass salt, the understood implicature is a request for salt.
- noun The process by which such a meaning is conveyed, implied, or suggested. In saying “Some dogs are mammals,” the speaker conveys by implicature that not all dogs are mammals.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun pragmatics An
implied meaning that is not expressed directly.
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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For Grice, irony is an overt violation of the maxim of truthfulness, and differs from metaphor and hyperbole only in the kind of implicature it conveys (metaphor implicates a simile based on what was said, hyperbole implicates a weakening of what was said, and irony implicates the opposite of what was said).
Language Log 2009
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Violating this implicature makes a sentence sound weird, as with (3b):
Are they trying to misunderstand what people say? « Motivated Grammar 2009
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Violating this implicature makes a sentence sound weird, as with (3b):
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The real definition of only in only two is something along the lines of “exactly”, but with the crucial additional implicature that this is a smaller number than expected.
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Now, the fact that one gets this implicature, that only two sounds so much better than only one thousand, ought to suggest that there is logic underlying the construction.
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The real definition of only in only two is something along the lines of “exactly”, but with the crucial additional implicature that this is a smaller number than expected.
Are they trying to misunderstand what people say? « Motivated Grammar 2009
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There was a question on NPR News today that asked (partially through implicature) why did this guy talk, when we needed torture to get the other guys to talk?
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For that reason, humans have developed complex systems of inference and implicature, conveyed meanings, and so on.
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Now, the fact that one gets this implicature, that only two sounds so much better than only one thousand, ought to suggest that there is logic underlying the construction.
Are they trying to misunderstand what people say? « Motivated Grammar 2009
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For that reason, humans have developed complex systems of inference and implicature, conveyed meanings, and so on.
I come to praise potential ambiguity, not to bury it « Motivated Grammar 2010
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