New Grice 'conversational Implicature

Conversational implicature is one of the most important subjects to the study of natural languages by pragmatics. It was initiated by American scholar Grice, and became a more complete subject after the development of such scholars like Horn and Levinson. In linguistics, the former was commonly named the classic Gricean conversational implicature, and the latter the neo-Gricean one. The greatest difference between the two lies in that the latter made a further research on generalized conversational implicature, which was usually ignored in the classic idea, and became an independent theory. This paper focuses on the content, nature, inferential apparatus and function of the pragmatic theory of generalized conversational implicature based on the analysis of the classic one.