It looks as if B's statement is not an answer to A's question. Yet, A can immediately interpret is as 'no' or 'probably not'.
How is one able to grasp something from the sentence, which literally means something else? Partially, it depends on A's assumption that B's answer is being 'relevant' and 'informative'. Give this assumption, A can predict that urgent work conventionally demands 'immediate attention' which might need more time and B might continue working till late evening. As a result, B cannot go to the theatre. That means, B's answer is not just a statement, it contains, what Grice calls, an 'implicature'.
Implicature may be of two categories depending upon whether it is associated with the linguistic content of utterances directly or indirectly. Those which include all non-truth-conditional aspects conveyed by an utterance solely due to words or forms the sentence contains are called conventional implicatures. For example, 'Many of the congressmen opposed the motion against total ban of liquor in the state'. Because 'many' is not the same 'quantity' as 'all'. The speaker is supposed to have followed the 'maxim of quantity' appropriately.
On the other hand, conversational implicatures are those which are derived from the content of the sentences used and owe their existence to the fact that participants in a conversation are contained by the common goal of communication to be cooperative. To make it clear, conversational implicatures depend not only on the utterance but on what other utterances the speaker could have produced but did not. For example, in conversation mentioned above, B suggests that he needs more time that day to finish off the work. But he did not say it. So the utterance becomes relevant in the conversation.
Conversational implicatures can further be divided into two classes - particular and generalized. "The former are crucially dependent not only on the content of the utterance and the Cooperative Principle, but also on the context of utterance. The latter are relatively independent of context and therefore can rather easily be confused with conventional implicatures since they are constantly associated with particular linguistic forms" (Sadock, 1978: 283). |
