8.1: Sometimes we mean more than we say

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The story in (1) concerns a ship’s captain and his first mate (second in command):

(1) The Story of the Mate and the Captain (Meibauer 2005, adapted from Posner 1980)

A captain and his mate have a long-term quarrel. The mate drinks more rum than is good for him, and the captain is determined not to tolerate this behaviour any longer. When the mate is drunk again, the captain writes in the logbook: “Today, 11th October, the mate is drunk.” When the mate reads this entry during his next watch, he gets angry. Then, after a short moment of reflection, he writes in the logbook: “Today, 14th October, the captain is not drunk.”

The mate’s log entry communicates something bad and false (namely that the captain is frequently or habitually drunk) by saying something good and true (the captain is not drunk today). It provides a striking example of how widely sentence meaning (the semantic content of the sentence) may differ from utterance meaning. Recall that we defined utterance meaning as “the totality of what the speaker intends to convey by making an utterance;”1 so utterance meaning includes the semantic content plus any pragmatic meaning created by the use of the sentence in a specific context.

In this chapter and the next we will explore the question of how this kind of context-dependent meaning arises. Our discussion in this chapter will focus primarily on the ground-breaking work on this topic by the philosopher H. Paul Grice. Grice referred to the kind of inference illustrated in (1) as a conversational implicature, and suggested that such inferences arise when there is a real or apparent violation of our shared default expectations about how conversations work.

In §8.2 we introduce the concept of conversational implicature, and in §8.3 we summarize the default expectations about conversation which Grice proposed as a way of explaining these implicatures. In §8.4 we distinguish two different types of conversational implicature, and mention briefly a different kind of inference which Grice referred to as conventional implicature. In §8.5–§8.6 we discuss various diagnostic properties of conversational implicatures, and talk about how to distinguish conversational implicatures from entailments and presuppositions.