Levinson
writes what I believe are the most instructive 70-something pages on the
subject of conversational implicature. He is, from the very beginning, anxious
to point out not only the great many advantages which the concept brings but
also the puzzles it gives rise to. “Implicature,” he writes, “stands as a
paradigmatic example of the nature and power of pragmatic explanations of
linguistic phenomena” (p. 97) The main output of such a theory is that – as
Grice in fact pointed out in Prolegomena to Grice (1989) – that
over and beyond the stable semantic core there is an unstable, contextual layer
of meaning. This layer of meaning may be seen as “the set of possible
implicatures”. As long as we are able to define and predict the usage of this
set, the theory itself might turn out to be profitable. Before we go further,
it might perhaps be handy to stress that this level-division is also present in
the nature of the four maxims (Quality, Quantity, Relation & Manner): they
are, indeed, maxims – not rules. They express maximally co-operative
communication and thus function not as conventions but as putting into
practice a rationale for co-operative exchange. As a matter of fact, one
of Grice’s powerful arguments was the fact that the same maxims or some
derivates of them seem to operate also within non-linguistic behavior.
