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Office, E.E. Implicature. Encyclopedia. Available online: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/60040 (accessed on 06 October 2026).
Office EE. Implicature. Encyclopedia. Available at: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/60040. Accessed October 06, 2026.
Office, Encyclopedia Editorial. "Implicature" Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/60040 (accessed October 06, 2026).
Office, E.E. (2026, September 16). Implicature. In Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/60040
Office, Encyclopedia Editorial. "Implicature." Encyclopedia. Web. 16 September, 2026.
Implicature
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In pragmatics, an implicature is a meaning that hearer or reader infers from an utterance in its communicative context, although that meaning is not explicitly stated and is not part of the expression’s conventional semantic content [1][2]. The inference arises from the assumption that the speaker’s contribution is interpretable in relation to the purposes of the exchange, contextual information, and expectations governing communication [1]. Conversational implicatures are derived pragmatically from these circumstances and are generally defeasible: they may be cancelled without logical contradiction when a speaker explicitly rejects the inferred meaning [1][3]. By contrast, conventional implicatures are associated with particular linguistic expressions and contribute additional meaning independently of the truth conditions of the proposition expressed [1][4]. Implicature is distinct from entailment, because an entailed proposition must be true if the utterance is true, whereas an implicature need not be; it is also distinct from presupposition, which concerns information treated as already accepted or taken for granted in discourse [2][3].

pragmatics conversational implicature inference contextual meaning

References

  1. Grice, H. P. Studies in the Way of Words; Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, 1989.
  2. Implicature. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 2026-9-16
  3. Jef Verschueren. Continental European Perspective View; Oxford University Press (OUP): Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, 2014; pp. 120-131. [CrossRef]
  4. Christopher Potts. The Logic of Conventional Implicatures; Oxford University Press (OUP): Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, 2004. [CrossRef]
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