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The Roots of (Scalar) Implicature

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Book cover Pragmatics, Semantics and the Case of Scalar Implicatures

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition ((PSPLC))

Abstract

A year after unveiling the notion of ‘implicature’ in his William James lectures at Harvard, Paul Grice published one of these lectures, a study of the relation of word meaning to utterer’s meaning within his overall framework for speaker meaning:

The wider programme...arises out of a distinction I wish to make within the lolal signification of a remark, a distinction between what the speaker has said (in a certain favored and maybe in some degree artificial, sense of ‘said’), and what he has ‘implicated’ (e.g., implied, indicated, suggested, etc.), taking into account the fact that what he has implicated may be either conventionally implicated (implicated by virtue of the meaning of some word or phrase which he has used) or non-conventionally implicated (in which case the specification of implicature falls outside the specification of the conventional meaning of the words used). (Grice 1968: 225; cf. also Grice 1989: 118)

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  1. Yale University, New Haven, USA

    Laurence R. Horn (professor of Linguistics and Philosophy)

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  1. Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali Politiche e Cognitive, Università di Siena 1240, Italy

    Salvatore Pistoia Reda (DAAD Visiting fellow) (DAAD Visiting fellow)

  2. Zentrum für Allegmeine Sprachwissenschaft, Germany

    Salvatore Pistoia Reda (DAAD Visiting fellow) (DAAD Visiting fellow)

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© 2014 Laurence R. Horn

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Horn, L.R. (2014). The Roots of (Scalar) Implicature. In: Reda, S.P. (eds) Pragmatics, Semantics and the Case of Scalar Implicatures. Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333285_2

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