Explain and discuss Grice’s concept of conventional implicature and relevance theory’s response to that concept..docx

explain and discuss grices concept of conventional implicature and relevance theorys response to that concept.introductionthe idea of implicature is a theoretical construct that was first introduced by grice in the william james lectures more than thirty years ago (grice, 1989). and grice used this idea to deal with the examples in communication where what a speaker means goes beyond the meaning literally expressed by the particular utterance.grices concept of conventional implicature and relevance theorys response to that concept most of the body of grice (1975) consists in the attempt to clarify the intuitive difference between what is expressed literally in the sentence and what is merely suggested or hinted at by the utterance of the same string of words. to distinguish the latter from the former, grice (1978) uses the neologisms implicate and implicature, and he refers to the linguistically coded part of utterance content as what is said. the sum of what is said in the sentence and what is implicated in an utterance of the same sentence is called the total signification of an utterance (grice 1989: 41). implicature itself is meant to cover a number of ways in that literally unsaid information can be conveyed.for instance, if i am with a friend who is eating an icecream and i ask something like, “what flavour is it?” and my friend might offer me a bite of her icecream. by offering some of the icecream to me, my friend has shown that she thinks i was implying that i want to taste it. this kind of implication was termed an implicature by grice. however grice is credited with introducing the concept of implicature, it has been pointed out that grice didnt actually define what the implicature in general is (saul 2002). implicature was defined negatively as what is communicated less what is said (sadock 1978). implicature was characterised simply as whatever is communicated that is not part of what is said by the speaker. the only positive characterisation of implicature by grice was his indication which it is related to the terms imply, suggest and mean (grice 1989). the issue for the gricean definition of the implicature is that it encompasses far too large and diverse a range of phenomena. if something is not said, then it constitutes pragmatic input into what is communicated. it means that implicature is ultimately equated with the pragmatic input in gricean and neo-gricean implicature theory (carston 1998: 477). while indexicality and lexical ambiguity, for instance, require some pragmatic input, no one would claim that the results of indexical resolution or disambiguation constitute implicatures. the relationship of other kinds of pragmatic phenomena identified by griceans and neo- griceans to the notion of implicature is much less clear. the relevance theoretic approach to implicature was introduced by sperber and wilson (1995) as a part of a broader attempt to shift pragmatics into the cognitive framework. in relation to the implicature, relevance theory can be characterized as essentially the reductionist theoretical approach for two reasons. firstly, it reduces all the pragmatic principles which have been proposed to underlie the generation of implicature by griceans and neo-griceans into a single principle of relevance. secondly, it reduces all the different species of meaning in the gricean framework into just two broad categories: implicature and explicature. sperber and wilson (1995: 182) introduced the notion of explicature, which was to complement the gricean notion of implicature, trying to show that pragmatic inferences contribute not only to what is implied, but also to what is explicitly communicated. they defined an explicature as the explicit assumption communicated by an utterance that is a development of a logical form encoded by the utterance. carston has done much of the work in relevance theory on explicit and implicit meaning (1995), and he has expanded upon this definition of explicature in the following manner:“a propositional form communicated by an utterance which is pragmatically constructed on the basis of the propositional schema or template (logical form) that the utterance encodes; its content is an amalgam of linguistically decoded material and pragmatically inferred material” (carston 2000: 10).pragmatic processes involved in deriving explicatures include the saturation, disambiguation, free enrichment, and ad hoc concept construction (carston 2000). relevance theorists have thus done much to show that many different pragmatic processes are involved in developing what is encoded by the utterance into the propositions which are actually communicated.the implicature is also defined as “any other propositional form communicated by the utterance; its content consists of wholly pragmatically inferred matter” (carston 2000: 10). the definition of implicature follows from sperber and wilsons original assumption that any assumption communicated that is not explicit must be implicit, and should be an implicature (sperber and wilson 1995: 182). so implicatures in relevance theory are primarily defined in terms of their relationship to another idea. in relevance theory, the implicature is essentially any communicated assumption which is not an explicature. the relevance theorists do note, but that the conceptual content of implicatures should be wholly inferred (carston, 2001), and to be inferred they should be intended by the speaker, and be understood by the hearer as intended (papafragou 2002). the implicature in the relevance theoretic framework is a much more restricted concept than in gricean and neo-gricean approaches, as it primarily encompasses only particularised conversational implicatures. the relevance theorists have argued that phenomena that are termed short-circuited implicatures(papafragou 2000), conventional implicatures (blakemore 2000), and metaphor (ruiz de mendoza 1998) all contribute to the explicatures of utterances, and are thus not actually the examples of implicature. although it is not entirely clear, it also appears that some examples of generalised conversational implicatures are treated as explicatures, and others are treated as implicatures by the relevance theorists (wilson and sperber 1998). conclusiondespite the intuitive appeal, the constructs of grices theory of implicature dont lend themselves easily to the linguistic application. from the point of view of the linguistic semantic analyses of the sort grice imagined the theoretical apparatus to assist, the concept of generalized conversational implicature seems the most promising, since means to delineate these elements of utterance content that, although normally carried by the linguistic items in the question, fall outside the linguistically coded content of a lexeme or construction. referencescarston, robyn (1998) informativeness, relevance and scalar implicature. in robyn carston, & seiichi uchida (eds.), relevance theory. applications and implications. amsterdam: john benjamins, pp. 179-236.grice, herbert paul (1989a). logic and conversation. in studies in the way of words (22-40). cambridge, ma: harvard universit