Generalized versus particularized conversational implicatures

Another key claim made by Grice was that conversational implicatures may be made available through one-off reasoning in a particular context by the speaker, which gives rise to particularized conversational implicature, or through regularized or conventionalized reasoning, which gives rise to generalized conversational implicature. To put it more straightforwardly, particularized conversational implicatures (PCI) require some specific contextual knowledge in order to be inferred by the hearer, whereas generalized conversational implicatures (GCI) do not.

The difference between particularized and generalized conversational implicatures can be illustrated by considering the following situation. Say, for instance, Michael is in a café with a friend who is eating some cake with her coffee, and he comments that the cake looks really nice. In saying that he thinks that his friend’s cake looks nice, a particularized conversational implicature potentially arises (i.e. that Michael would like to try his friend’s cake). Of course, whether this request is implicated on this particular occasion depends on the relationship between Michael and his friend (including whether they are close enough for such an offer to seem appropriate), whether Michael himself already has some cake at that time, and so on. It also depends, in part, on the response of Michael’s friend; if she responds with something like “Would you like some?” then not only does she show that she has drawn this particularized conversational implicature, but also gives rise to a generalized Conversational implicature by her saying “some cake”, which through conventionalized reasoning implicates “[but] not all of it”. Grice’s claim was that the latter is implicated in all contexts unless somehow blocked or suspended in some manner by other information in the context (e.g. going on to say something like “in fact why don’t you have it all?”). Generalized conversational implicatures were only treated in passing by Grice himself, but they have become a key focus of analysis in subsequent neo-Gricean accounts of implicatures, a point to which we will return.

We have discussed thus far a number of different types of implicature proposed by Grice. These different representations of what is implicated are summarized. 

However, as we have seen, while various types of implicature were proposed, Grice himself focused primarily on conversational implicatures, as it is to these that the Cooperative Principle and conversational maxims were intended to apply.