Before talking about Grice’s theory, let’s see an anecdote. It is a famous headline in newspaper. A director wants to know about the performance of an actress so he asks another director who has given her a role in a famous movie with the question of“How do you think of her performance?”And at the same time, the actress knows it is a big chance for her if the previous director could recommend her to the latter director. So she expresses her eager to take a role in new movie and requests the previous director could do her a favor. However, in fact, she is not a good actress in performing such a role in new movie whereas the director does not to refuse her please directly, so he says: “She is beautiful” as the response. In fact, the claim that she is beautiful means she is not good at performing the roles in movie. Here is whatimplicaturefunctions
Conversational implicature:non-truth-conditional inferences: derived from pragmatic principles in a particular context of utterance. According to J. Mey (2001), "conversational implicature concerns the way we understand an utterance in conversation in accordance with what we expect to hear". For example:
Generalized implicatures:the implicatures to be inferred by being closely associated with linguistic expressions, not much dependent on context, with the assumption that the speaker is observing the maxims. According to Grice, generalized conversational implicature refers to the implicature derived from such utterances as He saw a woman going into his house. The use of the indefinite article implies that the woman in question was not his wife. In conversation, people are generally conscious of those conversational maxims, trying to observe them as they can.
Conventional implicature:an implicature that arises not depending on particular context of language use; or non-truth conditional inferences that are not derived from superordinate pragmatic principles like the Grecian maxims but are simply attached by convention to particular lexical items (Levinson 1983); or it is related to the use of certain words regardless of the context in which it occurs. Take an example to illustrate it. “he is rich but he is not greedy.” According to Grice, this sentence has the implication that rich men are usually greedy, and this implicature is derived from the meaning of the word “but”.
a) What time is it?
b) The bus just went by or the milkman has just come.
How does a) understands what b) means in this particular context? As Leech remarks, "interpreting an utterance is ultimately a matter of' guesswork, or (to use a more dignified term) hypothesis formation" (1983). The guesswork involves cooperation between the speaker and the hearer in conversation; assumption that certain principles are in operation. But the guesswork may be right or wrong because the implicature is generated by the speaker and the inference is interpreted by the hearer. An implicature may lead to different inferences in a particular context.
Particularized implicatures:implicatures to be inferred by being much dependent on context with the assumption that the speaker is not observing the maxims. In other words, such implicatures arise when the speaker overtly or deliberately flouts or-violates some maxims or certain communicative purposes. We can see a dialogue to analyze it.
III. Conversational Implicature and Conventional Implicature
Grice distinguished what is said from what is implicated. By what is implicated it means an implicature as we have defined in the above. Grice went further to distinguish two different sorts of implicature: conventional implicature and conversational implicature.
IV.GeneralizedImplicatureandParticularizedImplicature
Grice also distinguished conversational implicatures by subdividing them into generalized and particularized ones. These two kinds of implicature respectively relate to the observance and the non-observance of the conversational maxims.
I. Implicature
First coined by Grice, the word “implicature” can be defined as what is intended by the speaker; invisible meaning or implicit meaning; additional conveyed meaning that is more than what words mean; what is communicated in context, not the meaning of words, phrases or sentences.
This means that speaker intends the utterance of a sentence to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of his intention. For Grice, meaning has to be interpreted in terms of the hearer and so meaning and intention were brought together in his analysis. This is the crucial point in understanding Grice's theory.