A first outline of pragmatics

A crucial basis for making pragmatic inferences is the contrast between what might have been uttered and what actually was uttered. Example (1.4) was a short, headed section from an information flyer about a restaurant. (Double quotes have been omitted because they would spoil the appearance, but this counts as a sequence of utterances. Remember that I am allowing utterances to be in speech, writing or print.)

The leaflet then switches to another topic, inviting us to infer that no provision is made for smoking. We cannot be certain. They might simply have forgotten to add something permissive that they intended to say about smoking, but it could be a pointedly negative hint to smokers. Nothing in the leaflet actually says that smoking is unwelcome or disallowed; so this implicature from (1.4) and its context is an elaboration well beyond the literal meaning of what appears in the leaflet.

Explicature, the second of the stages of interpretation described in Section 1.1.2, would have included working out that the heading in (1.4) is about coffee drinks, not, for instance, milkshake drinks .

Example (1.5) shows a kind of pragmatic inference generally available when words can be ordered on a semantic scale, for instance the value judgements excellent > good > OK.

Speaker A draws an implicature from B’s response because, if the accommodation was better than merely OK, B could have used the word good; if it was very good B could have used the word excellent. Because B did not say good or excellent, A infers that the accommodation was no better than satisfactory. At the time of utterance, A might well have heard and seen indications to confirm this implicature – perhaps B speaking with an unenthusiastic tone of voice or unconsciously hunching in recollection of an uncomfortable bed. Such things are also contextual evidence for working out implicatures.

The stage of explicature – before implicature (see Section 1.1.2) – would have involved understanding that, in the context of A’s question, B’s utterance in (1.5) has as its explicature ‘The work camp accommodation was OK’, the work camp being one that B had knowledge of and which must previously have been identified between A and B, probably earlier in the conversation.

The pragmatic inferences called implicatures and explicatures occur all the time in communication, but they are merely informed guesses. It is one of their defining features that they can be cancelled. In (1.5), B could have come back with “No, you’ve got me wrong; the accommodation was good”. This would cancel the implicature, but without contradiction, because accommodation that is ‘good’ is ‘OK’, so it is not a lie to say of good accommodation that it was OK.