In pragmatics (linguistics), implicature is the relationship between two statements where the truth of one suggests the truth of the other, but—distinguishing implicature from entailment—does not require it. For example, the sentence "Mary had a baby and got married" strongly suggests that Mary had the baby before the wedding, but the sentence would still be strictly true if Mary had her baby after she got married. Further, if we add the qualification "— not necessarily in that order" to the original sentence, then the implicature is cancelled even though the meaning of the original sentence is not altered.

This can be contrasted with cases of entailment. For example, the statement "The president was assassinated" not only suggests that "The president is dead" is true, but requires that it be true. The first sentence could not be true if the second were not true; if the president were not dead, then whatever it is that happened to him would not have counted as a (successful) assassination. Similarly, unlike implicatures, entailments cannot be cancelled; there is no qualification that one could add to "The president was assassinated" which would cause it to cease entailing "The president is dead" while also preserving the meaning of the first sentence.

Implicature and implication

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Parenthetical remark in last sentence is a wonderful use of conversational implicature. http://pic.gd/0ca5dc
kpich (Karl Pichotta) Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:51:02 -0000
Parenthetical remark in last sentence is a wonderful use of conversational implicature. http://pic.gd/0ca5dc

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