Implicature

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Implicature is a term from the philosophy of language and pragmatics , a sub-discipline of linguistics .

term

An implicature of a linguistic utterance is an aspect of meaning that is communicated through the utterance, but is only hinted at (instead of actually "said") by the speaker. In other words: the implicature makes it possible for a speaker to communicate more than the literal meaning of the expressions used actually implies. The strict separation between what is said literally and what arises as implicature goes back to the language philosopher Paul Grice , who also coined the term implicature in his 1975 essay Logic and Conversation . The made-up word “implicate” has also been coined to trigger an implicature (a speaker / an utterance “implicates” something).

Accordingly, the range of what is said is restricted by the ( semantic ) sentence meaning (i.e. the importance of individual set of elements, such as words, and the order and syntactic character), but it will contextually enriched (reference determination, disambiguation ) until it propositional , that is until it can be checked for truth. A sentence like “He went into the house” can only be checked for its truth if, based on the utterance situation, reference time etc., one knows who is referred to as “he” in the sentence and which house is being referred to etc. This determination of what has been said is controversial, since pragmatic processes are already incorporated here through the contextual enrichments. The relationship between what is said and the distinctions between semantics and pragmatics is the subject of extensive debates on the philosophy of language. What is important, however, with Grice: only the meaning that is said is truth-conditional, that is, only it plays a role in the truth value of a sentence.

The implicit, on the other hand, is never truth-conditional, since it is not part of what a speaker is saying with his utterance. Grice is different

  • conversational implicatures,
  • conventional implicatures.

Conversational implicatures

Conversational implicatures are based on the cooperation principle formulated by Grice . It says that communication is subject to rational rules: each speaker should make his contribution as the present moment of utterance requires. Grice names specific subconditions in the four conversational maxims . A conversational implicature can now arise, for example, if what is said only makes sense if we add an implicature.

An example: As a driver, I tell a pedestrian that my petrol is out. He answers me: “There is a gas station around the corner.” Now I will assume that his statement indicates that I can get gasoline at this gas station:

A: "I run out of gas."
B: "There's a gas station around the corner."
+> (B implied) There is petrol at the petrol station.

If it turns out that the gas station has been closed for ten years, I will not be able to blame B. In his words, he only said that there was a gas station around the corner - he only implied that there was gasoline there .

Grice distinguishes four categories of conversational maxims (based on the Kantian table of categories ):

  • Maxim of quantity: make your statement as informative as necessary!
  • Maxim of Quality: Don't say anything that you think is wrong or that you don't have adequate justification for!
  • The maxim of the relation: Be relevant!
  • The maxim of the manner: Express yourself clearly, unambiguously, briefly and neatly!

The implication in the above example goes back to the maxim of the relation (“be relevant”). In this case, I (or driver A) assume, based on the principle of cooperation, that speaker B adheres to the principle of cooperation and follows the maxims of conversation. In the same way, however, implicatures can “fill meaning” with utterances that, strictly speaking, are not true or even nonsensical, for example metaphors or tautologies . So z. For example, the metaphor “You are the sun in my eyes” or the tautology “A woman is just a woman” make a sense that they do not have semantically - their speaker will communicate with them more than he says.

Grice distinguishes between generalized conversational implicatures and particularized conversational implicatures . The former are not dependent on a specific context of the utterance, that is, they would be triggered by an utterance in every conceivable situation. A sentence like “I have three children” always implies that the speaker has no more than three children:

A: I have three children.
+> I don't have more than three children.

Mind you: the speaker does not say this, because if he had five children, it is also true that there are three children (namely among these five) to whom the same applies. However, it is felt to be misleading to then only mention the existence of three children; and precisely this intuition is explained by the fact that the implicature was drawn, according to which the speaker named the maximum number.

Another example: someone who says, “It's warm in Holland” implies that it's not hot in Holland. With generalized (quantity) implicatures, scales always play a role (so-called Horn scales). With the particularized conversational implicatures, however, the context always plays a role. The gasoline example is an example of such an implicature, because the sentence “There is a gas station around the corner” implies, taken in isolation, not always and in every situation, that gasoline is available at the designated gas station.

Certain properties apply to all conversational implicatures. The most important:

  • They can be canceled , that is, they can be withdrawn by the speaker without making it seem strange, for example: " There is a gas station around the corner, but it has long since gone bankrupt."
  • They are nondetachable , that is, you can use another expression that says almost the same thing, and the implicature arises anyway, because it arises from what is said. For example: "There's a gas station on the right corner."
  • The implicatures are universal. This means that they also come about in other languages.
  • They can be confirmed without this appearing redundant because their content is not part of what has been said. For example: "There is a gas station around the corner where you can fill up."

Conventional Implicatures

Conventional implicatures are much shorter with Grice and are even more controversial than the conversational. These implicatures are based on the conventional meaning of a particular term. And yet they should not be part of what was "said", since they are not authoritative for the truth of an utterance.

For example, the phrase “she is poor but pretty” implies a kind of opposition between poverty and physical attractiveness. It seems clear that this opposition - so generally assumed - is nonsensical. Nevertheless, the sentence according to Grice would be true if the person named is poor and pretty. Further examples: "Even Schröder regrets the reforms." (The speaker implies that this is surprising.) "He is a businessman, so he has taste." (Logical conclusion is implicated.) In the meantime, new approaches have emerged that incorporate the concept of Either reject conventional implicature entirely (e.g. Bach) or change it significantly (e.g. Potts).

Terminology (translation)

In the English original, Grice speaks of implicature and to implicate . Grice was a concern, no confusion with the semantic terms " implication " and "imply" (to imply) to avoid, which is why these terms "implikatieren" in general with "implicature" and transferred.

Andreas Kemmerling , who translated the Grice essay Logic and Conversation , has now translated implicature as "implicature", but to implicate as "implicate", which does not comply with the differentiation mentioned. In his handbook contribution “implication” Kemmerling uses “to implicate” for “to implicate”. The Duden sees the term implicature as a synonym for implicate , which also levels out the differentiation, since implicate stands for what is included by an implication and what is included by an implication .

Therefore: For “to implicate” both implicate and imply can be used without problems; “Imply” should rather be avoided or at least denoted in more detail by conversationally implying (to make the difference between “logically implying”, “conventionally implying” etc.).

The criticism of Grice's conception has led to further terms. Robin Carston introduces the "explicature", which is criticized by Kent Bach, who suggests "implication" for it. This is to clarify the enrichment of a propositional fragment in cases like the following:

  • "You will not die." (Explication / Implication: from this small wound)
  • "I haven't eaten anything yet." (Explicito / Implicit: today)

Mohamed Mohamed Yunis Ali has tried to show that Grice's concept of implicature corresponds roughly to what is called the “meaning of what is understood” ( dalālat al-mafhūm ) in Islamic legal text hermeneutics and the “meaning of what is said ” ( dalālat al-mantūq ) is compared. In the case of the “meaning of what is understood”, this hermeneutic theory further differentiates between the “understood of agreement” ( mafhūm al-muwāfaqa ) and the “understood of opposition” ( mafhūm al-muchālafa ). Ali translates these terms as "congruent implicature" ( congruent implicature ) and "counter-implicature" ( counter implicature ). For example, the counter-implication ( mafhūm al-muchālafa ) to the statement “The alms tax must be paid on freely grazing sheep ” is that no alms tax is payable on sheep kept in the stable. The principle plays an important role in the development of legal norms from the religious texts Koran and Hadith .

See also

literature

  • Mohamed Mohamed Yunis Ali: Medieval Islamic Pragmatics. Sunni Legal Theorists' Models of Textual Communication. Richmond, Surrey 2000.
  • Bach, Kent: Semantic Slack. What is said and more (PDF; 124 kB) . In: Tsohatzidis (Ed.): Foundations of Speech Act Theory. London u. a. 1994, pp. 267-291.
  • Bach, Kent: Conversational Impliciture . In: Mind and Language 9 (1994), pp. 124-162.
  • Carston, Robin: Language and cognition . In: Newmeyer (Ed.): Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey. Vol. 3: Language: Psychological and Biological Aspects. Cambridge 1988, pp. 38-68.
  • Grice, H. Paul: Logic and Conversation . In: Cole / Morgan (eds.): Speech acts (= Syntax and Semantics, 3), pp. 41–58; also in: Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, Harvard 1989, pp. 22–40. German: logic and conversation (trans. A. Kemmerling). In: Meggle (ed.): Action, communication, meaning. Frankfurt am Main 1993 (stw 1083), pp. 243-265.
  • Huang, Yan: Pragmatics . (Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics). Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007.
  • Kemmerling, Andreas: Implication . In: Stechow / Wunderlich (ed.): Semantics. Berlin, New York 1991 (= handbooks for linguistics and communication studies, 6), pp. 319–333.
  • Levinson, Stephen C .: Pragmatics (orig. 1983). Tübingen 2000 (= Concepts of Linguistics and Literature Studies, 39), Chapter “Conversational Implicatures”, pp. 107–181.
  • Meibauer, Jörg: Pragmatics. An introduction . Second improved edition. Tübingen 2001 (= Stauffenburg introductions, 12).
  • Potts, Christopher: The logic of conventional implicatures . Oxford 2005 (= Studies in Theoretical Linguistics, 7).
  • Rolf, Eckard: Saying and thinking. Paul Grice's Theory of Conversational Implicatures. West German publishing house, Opladen 994.
  • Claus Ehrhardt; Hans Jürgen Heringer: Pragmatics. Fink, Paderborn 2011 (UTB; 3480), pp. 46–48.

Web links

Wiktionary: implicature  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See e.g. E.g. Francois Recanati: Literal Meaning . Cambridge 2003, pp. 2-22.
  2. ↑ Snježana Kordić : implikature Konverzacijske . In: Suvremena lingvistika . tape 17 , no. 31-32 , 1991, ISSN  0586-0296 , HEBIS 173731031 , pp. 89 ( Online [PDF; 857 kB ; accessed on July 2, 2019]). PDF; 857 kB ( Memento from September 2, 2012 on WebCite )
  3. ↑ See Paul Grice: Logic and Conversation. In: ders .: Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge 1989, p. 32.
  4. ↑ See Paul Grice: Logic and Conversation. In: ders .: Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge 1989, p. 26f.
  5. ↑ See Paul Grice: Logic and Conversation. In: ders .: Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge 1989, p. 24.
  6. ↑ See Jörg Meibauer: Pragmatik. An introduction. Second edition. Tübingen 2001, p. 32.
  7. ↑ See Paul Grice, Logic and Conversation, translated by Andreas Kemmerling, in: Georg Meggle (Hrsg.): Action, Communication, Meaning, Frankfurt a. M. 1993, pp. 243-265.
  8. ↑ See Andreas Kemmerling, implication, in: Stechow / Wunderlich (ed.): Semantik. Berlin, New York 1991 z. BS 323.
  9. ↑ See Duden online. - Bibliographisches Institut, 2011 ( http://www.duden.de/zitieren/10119146/1.6 )
  10. ↑ Robin Carston, Language and cognition, in: Newmeyer (ed.): Language: Psychological and Biological Aspects. Cambridge 1988, pp. 38-68.
  11. ↑ See Kent Bach, Semantic slack, in: Tsohatzidis: Foundations of speech act theory, 1994
  12. ↑ See Jörg Meibauer, Pragmatik. An introduction, second edition, Tübingen 2001, p. 38.
  13. ↑ See Ali, p. 187.
  14. ↑ See Ali, p. 186.
  15. ↑ See Ali, pp. 187-233.