In Chapter 8 we mentioned the somewhat mysterious concept of conventional implicature. This term was coined by Grice, but he commented only briefly on what he meant by it. The most widely cited example of an expression that carries a conventional implicature is the word but. Grice used the example in (1a), based on a cliché of the Victorian era:
(1) a. She is poor but she is honest.
b. She is poor and she is honest. [Grice 1961: 127]
Grice argued that a speaker who says (1a) only asserts (1b). The word but provides an additional element of meaning, indicating that the speaker believes there to be a contrast between poverty and honesty. This extra element of meaning (implied contrast or counter-expectation) is the conventional implicature. It is said to be conventional because it is an inherent part of the meaning of but, and is not derived from the context of use. Grice called it an “implicature” because he, like Frege before him, felt that if this additional element of meaning is false but (1b) is true, we would not say that the person who says (1a) is making a false statement. In other words, the conventional implicature does not contribute to the truth conditions of the statement.1
Nevertheless, someone might object to (1a) as in (2), claiming that the word but has been misused. The core of this objection would not be the truth of the statement in (1a) but the appropriateness of the conjunction that was chosen.
(2) What do you mean “but”? There is no conflict between poverty and honesty!
Recent work by Christopher Potts and others has tried to clarify the nature of conventional implicature, and has greatly extended the range of expressions which are included under this label. In this chapter we will look at some of these expression types.
A core property of conventional implicatures is that they do not change the conditions under which the sentence will be true, but rather the conditions under which the sentence can be appropriately used. For this reason, some authors have made a distinction between truth-conditional meaning vs. use-conditional meaning.2 The truth-conditional meaning that is asserted in (1a) would be equivalent to the meaning of (1b), while the implied contrast between poor vs. honest comes from the use-conditional meaning of but. The term “use-conditional meaning” seems to cover essentially the same range of phenomena as “conventional implicature”, and we will treat these terms as synonyms.3
We begin in §11.2 with a discussion of the definition and diagnostic properties of conventional implicatures, as described by Potts. We illustrate this discussion using certain types of adverbs in English which seem to contribute useconditional meaning rather than truth-conditional meaning. In the rest of the chapter we look at some use-conditional expressions in other languages: honorifics in Japanese (§11.3), politeness markers in Korean (§11.4), honorific pronouns and other polite register lexical choices (§11.5), and discourse particles in German (§11.6).
1 Recall similar comments by Frege regarding but, which were quoted in Chapter 8.
2 Gutzmann (2015), Recanati (2004).
3 In this we follow the usage of Gutzmann (2015).
