ABSTRACT
Grice (1975) coined the term conversational implicature, referring to non-literal meanings that people infer based on the assumption of relevance and contextual information. Since then, implicature has been the critical concept of pragmatics theories that explain principles and mechanisms of human communication. As Morris (1938) originally claimed, syntax and semantics are concerned about the formal structure of an utterance and utterance-level meaning, whereas pragmatics is concerned about what the speaker means by the utterance. Implicature clearly illustrates the connection among syntax, semantics, and pragmatics because it represents a relationship between utterance meaning, or the literal sense of an utterance, and force, or the speaker’s intention behind the utterance (Thomas, 1995).
