conversational implicature

 What a speaker intends to communicate is characteristically far richer than what she directly
expresses; linguistic meaning radically underdetermines the message conveyed and
understood."
(L. R. Horn, "Implicature," in The Handbook of Pragmatics. Wiley, 2005)

 Dr. Gregory House: How many friends do you have?

Lucas Douglas: Seventeen.
Dr. Gregory House: Seriously? Do you keep a list or something?
Lucas Douglas: No, I knew this conversation was really about you, so I gave you an answer so
you could get back to your train of thought.
(Hugh Laurie and Michael Weston, "Not Cancer." House, M.D., 2008)

 "The probabilistic character of conversational implicature is easier to demonstrate than define.

If a stranger at the other end of a phone line has a high-pitched voice, you may infer that the
speaker is a woman. The inference may be incorrect. Conversational implicatures are a similar
kind of inference: they are based on stereotyped expectations of what would, more often than
not, be the case."
(Keith Allan, Natural Language Semantics. Wiley-Blackwell, 2001)

 Jim Halpert: I don't think I'll be here in 10 years.

Michael Scott: That's what I said. That's what she said.
Jim Halpert: That's what who said?
Michael Scott: I never know, I just say it. I say stuff like that, you know--to lighten the tension
when things sort of get hard.
Jim Halpert: That's what she said.
(John Krasinski and Steve Carell, "Survivor Man." The Office, 2007)

 "Generally speaking, a conversational implicature is an interpretive procedure that operates to

figure out what is going on. . . . Assume a husband and wife are getting ready to go out for the
evening:

8. Husband: How much longer will you be?

9. Wife: Mix yourself a drink.

To interpret the utterance in Sentence 9, the husband must go through a series of inferences based on
principles that he knows the other speaker is using. . . . The conventional response to the husband's
question would be a direct answer where the wife indicated some time frame in which she would be
ready. This would be a conventional implicature with a literal answer to a literal question. But the
husband assumes that she heard his question, that she believes that he was genuinely asking how long
she would be, and that she is capable of indicating when she would be ready. The wife . . . chooses not
to extend the topic by ignoring the relevancy maxim. The husband then searches for a plausible
interpretation of her utterance and concludes that what she is doing is telling him that she is not going
to offer a particular time, or doesn't know, but she will be long enough yet for him to have a drink. She
may also be saying, 'Relax, I'll be ready in plenty of time.'"
(D. G. Ellis, From Language to Communication. Routledge, 1999)

Also Known As: implicature