Conversational Implicature: A Cognitive Analysis

Conversational implicature has received considerable attention from philosophers, linguists and psychologists. Departing from an exploration of the cognitive foundation of implicature, this paper attempts to venture a brief analysis of the production and comprehension mechanism of this language phenomenon. Based on researches of cognitive linguistics, this paper points out that the mental construct, which is composed of all kinds of knowledge one has accumulated through his experiences, constitutes the basis that language draws upon for meaning; that knowledge chunks in the mental construct, when activated, have the capacity to spread their activations to other chunks when necessary, and that this characteristic produces the discrepancy between intentions and literal sense, and renders implicit expressions possible. At the level of communication, this paper endorses the identification of communicative intention and informative intention formulated by Sperber & Wilson, only a more basic level of meaning ---- literal sense is added in the analysis. This paper claims that, in implicit expressions, the degrees of manifestation of informative intention and communicative intention are different, and that the literal sense and the intentions is bridged by cognized stereotypical relations, which are the embodiment of the links between knowledge chunks in mental construct.