Kent Bach. “The Top 10 Misconceptions about Implicature”. ms, for a festschrift for Larry Horn, edited by Betty Birner and Gregory Ward (John Benjamins 2005).
I’ve known about conversational implicature a lot longer than I’ve known Larry. In 1967 I read Grice’s “Logical and Conversation” in mimeograph, shortly after his William James lectures, and I read its precursor “(Implication),” section III of “The Causal Theory of Perception”, well before that. And I’ve thought, read, and written about implicature off and on ever since. Nevertheless, I know a lot less about it than Larry does, and that’s not even taking into account everything he has uncovered about what was said on the subject long before Grice, even centuries before. So, now that I’ve betrayed my ignorance, I’ll display my insolence. I’m going to identify the most pervasive and pernicious misconceptions about implicature that I’ve noticed over the years.
1. Sentences have implicatures. 2. Implicatures are inferences. 3. Implicatures can’t be entailments. 4. Gricean maxims apply only to implicatures. 5. For what is implicated to be figured out, what is said must be determined first. 6. All pragmatic implications are implicatures. 7. Implicatures are not part of the truth-conditional contents of utterances. 8. If something is meant but unsaid, it must be implicated. 9. Scalar “implicatures” are implicatures. 10. Conventional “implicatures”? are implicatures.
Number 7 is the most common misconception I have heard. It is good that Kent Bach has made this summary of typical errors.
November 10th, 2004, at 1:13 pm #I have read this paper twice and loved it. It should be passed to both students and teachers. It says a lot of things I wished I could have put in the way. Kent Bach has served the cause of wisdom and truth, and it is a great service.
November 11th, 2004, at 3:06 pm #