Implicature, Relevance and Default Pragmatic Inference

Grice distinguished between generalized and particularized conversational implicatures. The latter he described as ‘cases in which an implicature is carried by saying that p on a particular occasion in virtue of special features of the context’. The former he characterized as cases in which the ‘use of a certain form of words … would normally (in the absence of special circumstances) carry such-and-such an implicature or type of implicature’ (Grice, 1989, p. 37). Grice did not develop the notion of a generalized conversational implicature (GCI) to any great extent. When he introduces the terminology in his paper ‘Logic and conversation’ he gives a few examples of the following sort:1 (1) A man came to my office yesterday afternoon. (2) Max found a turtle in a garden. (3) Robert broke a finger last night. In the case of (1) the hearer would be surprised to discover that the man was the speaker’s husband, for the use of the indefinite noun phrase ‘a man’ implicates that the speaker is not intimately related to the man. Similarly, in (2) we assume that neither the turtle nor the garden was Max’s own, for if they were, the speaker would surely have used the expressions ‘his turtle’ and ‘his garden’. On the other hand, the use of an indefinite noun phrase does not always implicate the lack of an intimate relation between the subject and the thing indicated by the noun phrase. In the case of (3) there is an implicature that it was Robert‖s own finger that Robert broke.2