Context and Implicature

This paper introduces Paul Grice’s notion of conversational implicature. The basic ideas — the cooperative principle, the maxims of conversation, and the contrast between implicature and presupposition — make it clear that conversational implicature is a highly contextualized form of language use that has a lot in common with non-linguistic behavior. But what exactly is its role? We invite the reader to view conversational implicature as a way of negotiating meaning in conversational contexts. Along the way, the reader will learn something of the theoretical properties of implicatures, why they are tricky to work with empirically, what can be done with them computationally, and (perhaps) where future research on the topic may lead. But the basic message of the paper is actually quite simple: context and conversational implicature are highly intertwined, and unravelling their interactions is a challenging and worthwhile research goal.