Conversational implicature

Robin Tolmach Lakoff
Table of contents

Conversational implicature (CI) is one part of the system of conversational logic devised by the philosopher of language H. Paul Grice (1967, 1975, 1978, 1989), with the 1975 article generally taken as Grice’s canonical statement of his theory. It forms one branch of the cooperative principle (CP), stated by Grice (1975: 45) as follows:

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