Wood-Wallace, D (2013) ‘Entailment, Implicature, Semantics and Pragmantics’ Nottingham: Academia

Entailment, Implicature, Semantics and Pragmatics.

As with anything written or spoken the language that is used is always from somebody’s
viewpoint (Wood-Wallace, 2011: 2) and due to the fact that there are a multitude of different lexical items
and syntactical structures for the speaker to choose from, the recipient of communication not only has to
understand the literal meaning of the string of words and sentences composed by the speaker or writer but
also what the intention of the communicative piece is (Grice, 1989: 86; Huang, 2009: 118). For example
‘It’s hot in here’ could pragmatically mean ‘open the window’, or ‘I’m hungry’ could equally mean ‘I
don’t want to go to bed yet’ (Peccei, 1999: 3). Speech is never ‘value free’, it is an encoded piece of
communication that in turn is decoded and understood by the recipient. This decoding of sentence
meaning, word structure and the lexicon has been studied for a number of years by many linguists (Atlas,
2005: 37, Blunter, 1998: 115; 2004: 488, Grice, 1975: 117; 1989: 86, McCawley, 1978: 245), with a
separate branch of lexical pragmatics emerging in the 1990s (Huang, 1998: 1; 2009: 118). The aims of the
current essay are to venture further in the semantic-pragmatic field to look more specifically within the
realms of entailment and implicature; with the intent of explaining the differences between both entailed
and implicated utterances. Equally, the essay will also look into the relationship between semantic and
pragmatic utterances and attempt to draw similarities in how entailment and implicature relate to these
distinctions. The text will look into how speakers encode and decode language and how context plays a
big part in this. Finally, the essay will look at Grice’s Maxims and the Cooperative Principle and attempt
to discuss features of conversational implicature with reference to these.

There largely still exists binary contention in the linguistic filed concerning the Semantic-
Pragmatic distinction, though generally ‘semantics concentrates on meaning that comes from purely
linguistic knowledge, while pragmatics concentrates on those aspects of meaning…that takes into account
knowledge about the physical and social world’ (Peccei, 1999: 1). According to Crystal (1987; 1995), the
definition of semantics is the ‘study of linguistic meaning’ (Crystal, 1987: 420; 1995: 157) that focuses on
the relationship between signifiers (lexemes) and what they stand for. In other words, the study of
semantics is to look at the denotation of lexis. Differing from this, the study of pragmatics it to examine
the connotations of lexemes and focus on the ways in which meaning is contributed to by context (Kracht,
2011: 1). It has been argued by some linguists such as Coppock (2012: 2-3), Huang (2007: 209) and
Levinson (1983:94) that the distinction between entailment and implicature are in line with the distinction
between semantics and pragmatics.
Entailment can be described as being ‘a meaning that is present on every occasion when an
expression occurs’ (Grundy, 2000: 73). It is a logical relation between two or more sentences where the

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 Wood-Wallace, D (2013) ‘Entailment, Implicature, Semantics and Pragmantics’ Nottingham: Academia

truth of one proposition depends upon the truth of another, and can be contained within it (Crystal, 1998:
162, Ja’far, 2011: 3, Kempson, 1977: 71, Lyons, 1977: 1). For example, if it is true that ‘Billy held a rose’
then it will always be true that ‘Billy held a flower’ as ‘Billy held a rose’ entails ‘Billy held a flower’.
Equally, if it is true that ‘Today is Wednesday’ then it cannot be true that ‘Today is Thursday’ as today
cannot simultaneously be both ‘Wednesday’ and ‘Thursday’ at the same time. The two examples listed
above represent the two different types of entailment that there can be- tautological and contradictory.
The first example was tautological as these are statements that are always true (due to what they entail),
whereas the second example is contradictory as it represents pairs of statements that cannot both be true at
the same time (again due to what the statements entail). The recipient of the communicative piece will
almost always use this logical relation with the lexemes to capture the tautology or contradiction (truth
condition) of the entailment; as the meaning of the utterance will remain the same no matter what the
context i.e. a rose will never not be a flower and Wednesday will never be Thursday. Entailment is a
common term used in the study of semantics, and infact Coppock (2012: 2) argues that ‘semantics can be
defined as the study of entailments’.
Differing from entailment, implicature refers to ‘any meaning which is conveyed indirectly or
through hints, and understood implicitly without ever being explicitly stated’ (Grundy, 2000: 73).
Implicatures refer to what is suggested in an utterance, it is not a condition for the truth of the utterance
and is neither expressed nor entailed by the utterance (Atlas, 2005: 36, Grice, 1975: 279, Griffiths, 2006:
124, McCawley, 1978: 245). For example, if Mark was asked whether he would like to play football
tomorrow and he replied ‘I have to take my mum to the doctors’ then Mark has neither replied ‘yes’ nor
‘no’ to the question but it can be understood that Mark is probably declining the offer of playing football.
This is because Marks’s response has been interpreted as relevant to the situation as it has been
understood that having to take his mum to the doctors more than likely means that Mark does not have
time to play football. Even though the meaning of the utterance is not explicitly stated the recipient of the
utterance can still decode what the speakers aims to communicate from the context in which it was
uttered, hence why the definition of implicature can be likened to the definition of pragmatics. Levinson
(1983) argues that amongst other aspects of discourse, part of pragmatics is the study of implicature, and
implicature can be likened to the definition of pragmatics (Levinson, 1983: 100).
There are two subtypes of implicature: conversational implicature and conventional implicature.
Conversational implicature refer to the ‘assumptions suggested by the speaker and inferred by the hearer
in an exchange situation. These assumptions are not encoded in the words said but are generated by the
interlocutors’ cooperation to achieve rational communication’ (Mariam, 2012: 16). It is a
nonconventional implicature based on an addressee’s assumption that the interlocutor is following the
Conversational Maxims or at least the Cooperative Principle. Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Maxims

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 Wood-Wallace, D (2013) ‘Entailment, Implicature, Semantics and Pragmantics’ Nottingham: Academia

of Conversation (Grice, 1975: 279) capture the ‘predictability of speaker’s meaning, some aspects of
which are context-free and some context-bound’ (Jaszczolt, 2010: 362).
Grice devised the Cooperative Principle that has four conversational maxims which enable
effective and cooperative conversation. Grice ‘came up with these not as a set of prescriptive rules that
people should follow in conversation, but as a means of describing and analysing the way people convey
meaning in real life interactions’ (UoS, 2012: 1). The four maxims are: the maxim of quantity (give the
right amount of information), quality (say only what you know to be true, do not say that for which you
lack adequate evidence or what you know to be false), relation (make what you say relevant to the topic)
and manner (be clear, avoid ambiguity and obscurity) (Grice, 1975: 279). When a conversational
implicature arises, there is an assumption that the speaker is obeying the rules of conversation (Grice’s
Maxims) to the best of their ability, and hence the pragmatic meaning of the implicature can be derived
(Blunter, 1998: 115, Grice, 1989: 86; Ishihara and Cohen, 2010: 286). For example, if when asked ‘Will
Alice be at the party tonight’ Jake replied ‘Her sister is having a baby’ then the interlocutor in
conversation with Jake would assume that Jake is obeying the Maxims of Conversation, and hence
believe that ‘Alice’s sister having a baby’ is relevant to the conversational exchange and means that
‘Alice will not be at the party tonight’.
Of course there are many reasons why an interlocutor might be uncooperative in conversation
(such as being questioned for information that they do not want to give or they do not like the person who
is attempting to engage in conversation with them) but in most conversational exchanges it is assumed
that both interlocutors are trying to be cooperative (Lindblom, 2001: 1601). Nevertheless, even where the
maxims of conversation are flouted in most cases the context in which it is uttered can still aid the
interpretation of meaning. For example if Jake was asked ‘Where’s Alice’ and he replied ‘There’s a blue
Honda outside the doctors’ then it would appear that Jake is violating the maxims of quality and relevance
(if you examine the utterance on a superficial level). However, with additional information Jake’s reply
can become relevant i.e. if the interlocutor knows that Alice drives a blue Honda and she would more
than likely have driven to the doctors because she was feeling ill earlier (Levinson, 1983: 118). It is the
context in which the reply is uttered that aids the speaker’s decoding of Jake’s reply where a maxim
appears to be flouted, a consistency also found within pragmatics. Where a speaker violates a maxim and
the reply cannot be decoded by the context, Grice (1975) argues that ‘one is liable to mislead’ (Grice,
1975: 320). If in the above example the recipient of Jake’s reply did not know what car Alice drove (and
she did not drive a blue Honda), then Jake would be misleading the recipient to believe that she did and
that Alice was at the doctors because a blue Honda was there (Coppock, 2012: 6).
Some conversational implicatures require no special knowledge in relation to the context in which
it is uttered; these are called generalized conversational implicatures (and break down further to scalar

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 Wood-Wallace, D (2013) ‘Entailment, Implicature, Semantics and Pragmantics’ Nottingham: Academia

implicatures and indefinite implicatures (Mariam, 2012: 15)). An example of this would be ‘Mary has one
child’ as no special knowledge of context is required to know that ‘Mary has no more or no less than one
child’. However, other conversational implicatures require special knowledge in relation to the context of
the exchange in which both speaker and hearer understand. These implicatures are called particularized
conversational implicatures and are conversational implicatures that are derivable only in a special
context (Green and Carberry, 1992: 69). An example of this would be if when asked ‘Do you like George
Clooney?’ Mary replied ‘He’s the sunshine through my windows’. This reply that George Clooney is the
sunshine through Mary’s windows would ordinarily not convey anything to do with whether or not Mary
likes George Clooney, but the implicature in this case depends on the context in which it was said as well
as the utterance itself, and hence Mary’s reply implicates that she really likes George Clooney.
Differing from conversational implicature, conventional implicature is an implicature that is ‘part
of a lexical item’s or expression’s agreed meaning, rather than derived from principles of language use’
(Phannguyen, 2012: 28). These are implicatures that are independent of the Cooperative Principle and its
four Maxims but are instead associated with specific lexical items that result in extra meaning when the
lexical items are used (Partee, 2009: 9). An example of a conventional implicature would be ‘Mary was
an accountant but she was poor’. The lexical item ‘but’ adds extra meaning to the utterance as it implies
that ‘accountants are not usually poor’. Here, it is the minor lexical item ‘but’ that actually implicates the
most meaning within the utterance.
Both conversational and conventional implicatures refer to what is suggested in an utterance, they
are used as decoding techniques to understand the pragmatic meaning of what an interlocutor is
attempting to communicate.

One of the crucial differences between entailment and implicature is that implicatures can be
cancelled where as entailments must always follow from the basic sentence (Bennet, 2012: 1). For
example, it would make no sense to say ‘Billy held a rose but he did not hold a flower’ as the truth of
Billy holding a rose signifies that Billy held a flower. However in answering whether or not he would like
to play football tomorrow it would be reasonable for Mark to reply ‘I have to take my mum to the doctors
but I’ll take her early in the morning so I can come’. Here, the first part of Mark’s reply ‘I have to take
my mum to the doctors’ indicates that Mark is implying that he cannot play football, however this
interpretation of meaning is then cancelled by the latter part of his reply ‘but I’ll take her early in the
morning so I can come’- hence it is decoded that Mark can play football tomorrow. It is because
implicatures can be cancelled where as entailments cannot that implicatures and entailments can be
likened to the distinctions of pragmatics and semantics. Like pragmatics; the implicature of an utterance
can change its meaning depending on context, where as like semantics; the entailment of an utterance will

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 Wood-Wallace, D (2013) ‘Entailment, Implicature, Semantics and Pragmantics’ Nottingham: Academia

never change (Blunter, 1998: 115; 2004: 488, Griffiths, 2006: 134). Both implicature and entailment are
concerned with language and meaning, and like pragmatics and semantics there is a strong link between
the two (Huang, 2007: 209). In fact, the links between implicature, entailment, pragmatics and semantics
are so strong that some linguists refuse to distinguish between them and argue that they are infact one of
the same. On the one hand there is semantic reductionism (pragmatics should be entirely reduced to
semantics) and on the other there is pragmatic reductionism (semantics should be entirely included in
pragmatics) (Huang, 2007: 210). In addition to this, a less bias and more favourable complementary view
sees both fields as ‘complementary through distinct subdisciplines’ (Huang, 2007: 211).
To conclude, this essay looked at entailment and implicature specifically within the semantic-
pragmatic field. It established that like semantics; entailment is associated with truth conditions and that
these do not change with context. In addition to this the text discovered that like pragmatics implicatures
can change depending on context and that implicatures (like pragmatics) are conveyed indirectly or
through hints. It was found that the distinction between both entailment and implicature could be likened
to the distinction between semantics and pragmatics (Coppock, 2012: 2-3, Huang, 2007: 209, Levinson,
1983: 132), with entailments part of the semantic field (Coppock, 2012: 2) and implicature part of the
pragmatic field (Levinson, 1983: 100). The text revealed that there are two types of entailment:
tautologies (where the truth condition of one utterance entails the truth of another utterance) and
contradictions (where the truth condition of one utterance denies the truth condition of another utterance).
Similarly, the essay established two main types of implicatures: conversational implicatures (generated by
the interlocutors’ cooperation to achieve rational communication) and conventional implicatures
(generated through a specific lexical item that adds extra meaning to the utterance and independent of the
cooperative principle). Conversational implicatures break down further into generalized implicatures
(formed by both scalar and indefinite implicatures where no special knowledge of context is required) and
particularized implicatures (where mutual understanding of the context between speaker and listener is
required to decode the implicature). The text discussed features of conversational implicatures with
reference to Grice’s Maxims and the Cooperative Principle (Grice, 1975: 279), and found that even where
a maxim appears to be flouted the context of the utterance can itself decode its meaning. Where context
cannot decode the violated maxim it was concluded that the interlocutor is liable to mislead. Lastly, the
essay established that a crucial difference between entailment and implicature is that implicatures can be
cancelled whereas entailments cannot.

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