summary of unit 3 conversational implicature

Summary of Unit 3 “Conversational implicature” The concept of conversational implicature is one of the most important aspects in pragmatics. The reasons for its salience are as follows: Firstly, it presents many paradigmatic examples and pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena. Secondly, its possible implicit meaning rather than its explicit meaning makes contribution to its importance. Thirdly, implicature seems likely to affect substantial simplifications in both the structure and the content of semantic descriptions. Fourthly, it may make various basic facts about language be understood properly. Finally, the origins of the principles of implicature give it a great explanatory power. The key ideas of implicatures were proposed by Grice at Harvard in 1967. He expressed a general co-operative principle, which consists of the maxim of quality, the maxim of quantity, the maxim of relevance and the maxim of manner. Any one of the four maxims was flouted, and then implicatures came into existence. From the way implicatures are calculated, Grice suggested some characteristics of implicatures: They are cancellable or more exactly defeasible, non-detachable, calculable and non- conventional. After that, Wilson & Sperber added another feature as determinable. However, some problems and doubts about implicatures arose according to the test for implicatures. For example, when one sentence or word was cancelled, it may make misunderstanding and ambiguity. Some quite detailed arguments may be found in Manner implicatures that they must be read from the level of semantic representation, including some specific logical form. Based on those problems, Levinson proposed different kinds of implicatures of communicational content, including conventional implicatures as well as non- conventional implicatures. The non-conventional implicatures are made up of conversational implicatures and non-conversational implicatures. In addition, the conversational implicatures can be divided into general and particular ones. According to his own classification of implicatures, Levinson pointed out it is only the particular truth-conditional content of an utterance that can be explained with Grices cooperative principles, while most of the general utterances couldnt be described with Grices theory properly. Therefore, to learn the generalized Quantity implicatures, Levinson referred to the notion of linguistic scale, the work of Horn and Gazdar, to consider two specific and important sub-cases: scalar Quantity implicatures and clausal Quantity implicatures. Whats more, Levinson utilized some examples to show the limitations of Grices cooperative principles and to explain some other general conversational implicatures rather than the particular ones with the help of linguistic scale, and Levinson proposed the principle of informativeness as an independent maxim, trying to propose a more powerful and convincing model for people to explain the implicatures of language. Apart from the explanation of implicatures suggested by Grice, those arising from the exploitation or flouting of the maxims also contributed to the study of rhetoric. The subject of metaphor has been the focus of much thought since around Aristotles Rhetoric. Levinson tried to establish the need for a pragmatic approach to metaphor on account of the failure of semantic theories of metaphor. However, when he considered the comparison theory and the interaction theory, Levinson found that there were numerous problems for the account of metaphor, like inaccurate paraphrase, more focus on the contingent and factual attributes rather than the semantic features. To have a better understanding of metaphor, Miller came up with a rule relying on the tripartite classification of metaphors: nominal metaphors, predicative metaphors and sentential metaphors. However, both of the two main semantic approaches to metaphor have substantial problems when reverted to Grices theory. In terms of those empirical studies of interaction, Levinson argued that the theory of metaphor can involve the effect of a very general cognitive ability. In short, the theory of conversational implicature is a theory of language use. Therefore, it can show co