Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T12:49:28.942Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Inference and Implicature

from Part I - Fundamentals of Sociopragmatics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2021

By
Marina Terkourafi
Edited by
Michael Haugh ,
Dániel Z. Kádár  and
Marina Terkourafi
Michael Haugh
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Dániel Z. Kádár
Affiliation:
Hungarian Research Institute for Linguistics, and Dalian University of Foreign Languages
Marina Terkourafi
Affiliation:
Leiden University
Get access

Summary

This chapter covers the notions of inference and implicature from a broad pragmatic and sociopragmatic perspective. Starting from the fact that inference has wide applicability also in psychology and logic, while implicature is limited only to pragmatics, it opens by drawing three distinctions: (1) between inference in a broad and in a narrow sense, (2) between inference and implicature and (3) between inference and implicature as both product and process. It then discusses processes of implicature generation within Gricean and post-Gricean accounts. While the general position taken is that 'speakers implicate, hearers infer', this position is also problematized by drawing on sociopragmatics research that challenges the notion of the speaker’s intention and explores how (else) meaning can be generated.

Keywords

inferenceimplicaturenatural meaningnon-natural meaningintentionGriceanworld-knowledge
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics , pp. 30 - 47
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allan, K. (2016). The reporting of slurs. In Capone, A., Kiefer, F. and Lo Piparo, F., eds., Indirect Reports and Pragmatics: Interdisciplinary Studies. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 211–32.Google Scholar
Ameka, F. K. and Terkourafi, M. (2019). What if … ? Imagining non-Western perspectives on pragmatic theory and practice. Journal of Pragmatics, 145, 72–82.Google Scholar
Bach, K. and Harnish, R. M.  (1979). Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, S. (1987). Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different? Journal of Pragmatics, 11, 145–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carston, R. (2002). Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Danziger, E. (2011). Once more with feeling: A forbidden performance of the Great Speech of the Mopan Maya. Anthropological Quarterly, 84(1), 121–40.Google Scholar
Degen, J. and Tanenhaus, M. K. (2019). Constraint-based pragmatic processing. In Cummins, C. and Katsos, N., eds., Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(4), 453–76.Google Scholar
Fodor, J. A. (1983). Modularity of Mind. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Foucault,  M. (1978). The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Franke, M. and Degen, J. (2016). Reasoning in reference games: Individual- vs. population-level probabilistic modeling. PLoS ONE, 11(5), e0154854. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0154854CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Green, M. (2019). Organic meaning: An approach to communication with minimal appeal to minds. In Capone, A., Carapezza, M. and Lo Piparo, F., eds., Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy. Part II Theories and Applications. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 211–28.Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1957). Meaning. The Philosophical Review, 66, 377–88. Reprinted in: Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 213–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1969). Utterer’s meaning and intentions. The Philosophical Review, 78, 147–77. Reprinted in: Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 86–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. and Morgan, J., eds., Syntax and Semantics. Vol. III: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, pp. 41–58. Reprinted in: Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 22–40.Google Scholar
Haugh, M. (2002). The intuitive basis of implicature: Relevance Theoretic implicitness versus Gricean implying. Pragmatics, 12(2), 117–34.Google Scholar
Haugh, M. and Jaszczolt, K. (2012). Speaker intentions and intentionality. In Allan, K. and Jaszczolt, K. M., eds., Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 87–112.Google Scholar
Huang, Y. (2007). Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hirschberg, J. (1991). A Theory of Scalar Implicature. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Horn, L. (1984). Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicature. In Schiffrin, D., ed., Meaning, Form, and Use in Context. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 11–42.Google Scholar
Levinson, S. C. (1992). Activity types and language. In Drew, P. and Heritage, J., eds., Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 66–100.Google Scholar
Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lyons, J. (1995). Linguistic Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Marwick, A. and boyd, d. m. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media and Society, 13(1), 114–33.Google Scholar
Matsumoto, Y. (1989). Politeness and conversational universals: Observations from Japanese. Multilingua, 8, 207–21.Google Scholar
McCarthy, J. and Hayes, P. J. (1969). Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of artificial intelligence. Machine Intelligence, 4, 463–502.Google Scholar
McNally, L. 2017. Scalar alternatives and scalar inference involving adjectives: A comment on van Tiel, et al. 2016. In Ostrove, J., Kramer, R. and Sabbagh, J., eds., Asking the Right Questions: Essays in Honor of Sandra Chung. Santa Cruz: University of California Santa Cruz, Linguistics Research Center, pp. 17–28.Google Scholar
Noveck, I. (2010). Inferential comprehension. In Cummings, L., ed., The Pragmatics Encyclopedia. London: Routledge, pp. 220–22.Google Scholar
Pinker, S., Nowak, M. A. and Lee, J. J. (2008). The logic of indirect speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(3), 833–8.Google Scholar
Robbins, J. and Rumsey, A. (2008). Introduction: Cultural and linguistic anthropology and the opacity of other minds. Anthropological Quarterly, 81(2), 407–20.Google Scholar
Schank, R. C. and Abelson, R. P. (1977). Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Shannon, C. E. and Weaver, W. (1963). The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. ([1986] 1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (2008). A deflationary account of metaphors. In Gibbs, R., ed., The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 84–105.Google Scholar
Tannen, D. (1993). The relativity of linguistic strategies: Rethinking power and solidarity in gender and dominance. In Tannen, D., ed., Gender and Conversational Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 165–88.Google Scholar
Tanner, D., Goldshtein, M. and Weissman, B. (2018). Individual differences in the real-time neural dynamics of language comprehension. Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 68, 299–335.Google Scholar
Terkourafi, M. (2005). Pragmatic correlates of frequency of use: The case for a notion of ‘minimal context’. In Nikiforidou, K., Marmaridou, S. and Antonopoulou, E., eds., Reviewing Linguistic Thought: Converging Trends for the 21st Century. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 209–33.Google Scholar
Terkourafi, M. (2014). The importance of being indirect: A new nomenclature for indirect speech. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 28(1), 45–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Tiel, B., van Miltenburg, E., Zevakhina, N. and Geurts, B. (2016). Scalar diversity. Journal of Semantics, 33, 137–75.Google Scholar
Wharton, T. (2003). Natural pragmatics and natural codes. Mind and Language, 18 , 447–77.Google Scholar
Wharton, T. (2009). The Pragmatics of Non-Verbal Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, D. and Sperber, D. (1986). Inference and implicature in utterance interpretation. In Myers, T., Brown, K. and McGonigle, B., eds., Reasoning and Discourse Processes. London: Academic Press, pp. 241–63.Google Scholar
Woods, J. (2010). Inference. In Cummings, L., ed., The Pragmatics Encyclopedia. London: Routledge, pp. 218–20.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×