On Conversational Implicature and Conventional Implicature

In daily communication, people often intend to convey more than the words they literally utter. The literal, semantic meaning of a sentence can be enriched by its implicit and pragmatic meanings. The term implicature refers to an interpretation of what a speaker didn’t explicitly say but intended to say. Two broad categories of implicatures can be distinguished. On the one hand, there are conversational implicatures of which the scalar implicature is the most widely investigated subtype. On the other hand, there are conventional implicatures which have rarely been experimentally investigated. This paper discusses both types of implicatures from the perspectives of their similarities and differences.