Abstract
This article aims to investigate the notion of implicature and its connections with speaker’s intentions, communicative responsibility and normativity. Some scholars stress the normative character of conversational implicatures more than their psychological dimension. In a normative perspective, conversational implicatures don’t correspond to what the speaker intends to implicate, but should be interpreted as enriching or correcting inferences licensed by the text. My chapter aims to show that the idea of an implicature that the speaker does not intend to convey is not persuasive. In Grice’s theory conversational implicatures are speaker-meant: this means that inferences derived by the addressee but not intended by the speaker should not count as conversational implicatures. On the contrary, I will claim that propositions intended by the speaker and not recognised by the addressee should count as implicatures, if the speaker has made her communicative intention available to her audience.
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Notes
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Cf. Grice (1989).
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- 5.
According to Grice, what is said (i.e. B.) is "closely related to the conventional meaning of the… sentence… uttered" (i.e. A.) and must correspond to "the elements of the [sentence], their order, and their syntactic character". It is closely related but not identical to what the sentence means, because the sentence may contain ambiguities or indexicals: Grice (1969, 1989, p. 87).
- 6.
Grice (1975, 1989, p. 26): "Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction".
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Saul (2002a, p. 229).
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Cf. Saul (2002a, p. 229).
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The five cases are taken, with variations, from Saul (2002a).
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Cf. Saul (2002a, p. 231): "The implicature was blocked because a speaker cannot conversationally implicate something which the audience is not required to assume that she thinks". In this example, as in other examples, there is a crucial distinction to be made: the one between the intended addressee (the addressee intended by the speaker) and the actual audience. In order to adhere to Saul's arguments I will not make use of the distinction in what follows.
- 18.
Saul (2002a, p. 242).
- 19.
Cf. Bach and Harnish (1979, p. 15): "its fulfilment consists in its recognition". Bach and Harnish's theory is a development of Grice's, and of his intention-based and inferential view of communication. To many, however, their position is too strong.
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According to Marina Sbisà, a conversational implicature isn't necessarily a proposition believed by the speaker, but a proposition that should be accepted by the speaker. This means that the speaker may be wrong about an implicature: even if she does not intend to convey a particular implicature, there are cases in which this should in any case be worked out by the addressee. In Sbisà's framework, implicatures are normative virtual objects. The alleged implicature does not count as conveyed meaning only if to attribute that communicative intention to the speaker would be absurd or contradictory: but if the text licenses it, the derivation of a particular implicature will be legitimate, even if S has no intention of conveying it.
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Grice (1961, 1965 p. 448).
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Cf. Saul (2002a, pp. 238–239).
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Saul (2002a, p. 245): "conversationally implicating something… fails to guarantee audience uptake but does mean that the speaker has fulfilled her communicative responsibilities with regard to what she wants to communicate… she may not have communicated her intended message, but she has made it available".
- 32.
Cf. Predelli (2002, pp. 315–316).
- 33.
Cf. Davis (2010).
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Bianchi, C. (2013). Writing Letters in the Age of Grice. In: Capone, A., Lo Piparo, F., Carapezza, M. (eds) Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01011-3_8
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