Studying implicit messages: A different approach

Griceans, neo-Griceans, and Relevance theorists are concerned with explaining the way implicatures are arrived at. This paper supplements such study by considering the nature of implicatures and their relationships to the utterances they derive from. On our approach, the actual speaker and hearer on a particular occasion are abstracted from. We introduce a new term – pragmatically conveyed message components, which comprises both implicatures and what has variously been called ‘explicatures’ and ‘implicatures’, as well as additional kinds of information, not treated as such in the traditional literature. Four levels of pragmatically conveyed message components are identified between which certain dependencies can be shown to hold. In addition, the boundary between implicatures and inferences is discussed and clarified.