Implicature in Discourse Analysis

 Sometimes, when we are talking with other people, the problem happened is easy to express an idea but it is difficult to interpret it because every utterance needs to be interpreted based on its context. It means that what is uttered depends on who, where, when, and in what occasion the utterance appears.

Brown and Yule (1983:1) explain that discourse analysis is committed to an investigation of what and how that language is used so that we can utter everything to another people with the same interpretation. The term implicature is used by Grice (1975) to account for what a speaker can imply, suggest or mean, as distinct from what the speaker literally says.

Yule (1996:36) adds that implicature is a primary example of more being communicated than is said but in order for them to be interpreted, some basic cooperative principle must first be assumed to be in operation. Furthermore, Grice as quoted by Levinson (1992:127) explains that the term of implicature to be a general cover term to stand in contrast to what is said or expressed by the truth condition of expression, and to include all kinds of pragmatic (non-truth-conditional) inference discernible.

The theory of implicature, which is proposed by Herbert Paul Grice, is the one particularly used to analyze the words or utterances. Grice divided implicature into conventional and conversational implicature, and further he distinguished conversational implicature into generalized and particularized implicature.

Conventional implicature is non-truth-conditional inferences that are not derived from super ordinate pragmatic principles like the maxims, but are simply attached by convention to particular lexical items or grounds that it had colored stripes in it and the legend on the tube said, “Actually fight decay”. The lexical item “actually” has a literal meaning or entailment – it means in reality or in actuality, because it is closely associated with the particular lexical item, so, it can be said ad conventional implicature (Grundy, 2000:84).