CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATION

In a normal setting where people are cooperating toward reaching a shared goal, they often conform quite closely to Grice’s conversational rules. If, on the whole, people did not do this, we could not have the linguistic practices we do. If we thought, for example, that people very often lied (even about the most trivial matters), the business of exchanging information would be badly damaged.

Still, people do not always follow these conversational rules. They withhold information, they elaborate needlessly, they assert what they know to be false, they say the first thing that pops into their heads, they wander off the subject, and they talk vaguely and obscurely. When we observe actual conversations, it is sometimes hard to tell how any information gets communicated at all.

The explanation lies in the same conversational rules. Not only do we usually follow these conventions, we also (1) implicitly realize that we are following them, and (2) expect others to assume that we are following them. This mutual understanding of the commitments involved in a conver- sational act has the following important consequence: People are able to convey a great deal of information without actually saying it.

A simple example will illustrate this point. Again suppose that a person, with smoke billowing behind him, comes running up to you and asks,

“Where’s a fire extinguisher?” You reply, “There’s one in the lobby.” Through a combination of conversational rules, notably relevance, quantity, and man- ner, this commits you to the claim that this is the closest, or at least the most accessible, fire extinguisher. Furthermore, the person you are speaking to assumes that you are committed to this. Of course, you have not actually said that it is the closest fire extinguisher; but you have, we might say, implied this. When we do not actually say something but imply it by virtue of a mutu- ally understood conversational rule, the implication is called a conversational implication.