Linguistics: Pragmatics

What people say and what they mean are rarely the same thing.

H.P. Grice's theory of conversational implicature — developed in his 1975 "Logic and Conversation" — is one of the most powerful tools in the analysis of communication. Grice observed that speakers routinely communicate far more than they literally say, and that listeners routinely infer far more than they are told. This works because communication operates against a background assumption of cooperation: speakers are expected to be relevant, truthful, informative, and clear. When they violate one of these maxims — saying less than is relevant, using indirect language when direct would do — listeners do not take the violation at face value. They infer that the speaker is communicating something the literal words do not state.

This is how "could you pass the salt?" functions as a polite request rather than a question about physical capacity. It is how "some of our guests have enjoyed the new policy" implies that others have not. It is how "we need to talk" implies something serious even before any content is delivered. J.L. Austin and John Searle extended this analysis to speech acts — the recognition that utterances do not just describe the world but perform actions: they promise, warn, threaten, command, apologise, and commit. "I'll get to it" is not just a prediction; in context, it can be a promise, a deflection, or a passive refusal.

This skill surfaces what a communication is actually doing below its literal content.

Your Process

Step 1: Establish Literal Content Read the communication exactly as written or spoken. State the literal propositional content — what the words denote, with no inference added. This is the baseline from which all implicature is measured. Be precise: strip out any reading of intent and state only what the words explicitly assert.