Questions: Conventional Implicature and Non-Truth-Conditional Meaning

Question 1

Consider: 'She is poor and she is honest' vs. 'She is poor but she is honest.' Under what conditions are these sentences true or false, and what differs between them?

• A. They are true under different conditions: 'but' requires that poverty and honesty are genuinely contrasting properties
• B. They have identical truth conditions but 'but' conventionally implicates a contrast or tension between the conjuncts
• C. They have identical truth conditions, and any difference in meaning is a conversational implicature derived from context
• D. 'But' is stronger than 'and,' so 'she is poor but honest' is true only when the speaker is genuinely surprised

Answer: (B)

Both sentences are true in exactly the same worlds: wherever she is both poor and honest. The word 'but' does not change when the sentence is true — that is precisely what 'non-truth-conditional' means. Yet the sentences communicate something different: 'but' conventionally signals contrast or tension between the conjuncts. This contrast is a conventional implicature — encoded in the word by linguistic convention, not derived from reasoning about what the speaker must have meant. Option C is wrong because the contrast meaning is not cancellable or context-dependent, as conversational implicatures are.

Question 2

A speaker says: 'Some of my students passed the exam — in fact, all of them did.' Now consider: 'She is poor but honest — I don't mean to suggest any contrast or tension between those facts.' What do these examples illustrate?

• A. Both are cancellations: the first cancels a conversational implicature, the second cancels a conventional implicature
• B. The first successfully cancels a scalar implicature; the second sounds bizarre or contradictory, showing conventional implicatures are non-cancellable
• C. Both are successful cancellations, demonstrating that all implicatures are context-dependent
• D. Neither can be cancelled because once an implicature is communicated, it becomes part of the literal meaning

Answer: (B)

Cancellability is the diagnostic test that distinguishes conversational from conventional implicature. The scalar implicature ('only some passed') is derived from cooperative reasoning and can be cancelled without contradiction by providing more information. But the contrast-meaning of 'but' is encoded in the word by convention — trying to retract it ('I don't mean to imply contrast') conflicts with the word's conventional contribution, creating incoherence. This non-cancellability is precisely what makes it a conventional implicature rather than a conversational one.

Question 3

'But' and 'and' make sentences true under exactly the same conditions, yet they differ in what they conventionally implicate.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

True. This is the paradigm case of conventional implicature. 'She is poor and she is honest' and 'she is poor but she is honest' are logically equivalent — both are true just when both conjuncts are true. Yet the sentences are not communicatively equivalent: 'but' conventionally implicates contrast or tension between the conjuncts in a way that 'and' does not. The contrast-meaning is non-truth-conditional (it doesn't affect when the sentence is true) but it is real and encoded in the word's conventional meaning.

Question 4

Conventional implicatures, like conversational implicatures, can be cancelled by a speaker without contradiction.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

False. Non-cancellability is the defining feature of conventional implicature that distinguishes it from conversational implicature. Conversational implicatures are generated by pragmatic reasoning about what a cooperative speaker must intend, so they can be withdrawn when the speaker provides more information ('Some passed — in fact, all did'). Conventional implicatures are baked into specific words by convention and cannot be retracted without incoherence: 'She's poor but honest — I don't mean to suggest any contrast' sounds contradictory because you're using 'but' while denying its conventional contribution.

Question 5

What is the key feature that distinguishes conventional implicature from conversational implicature, and why does this distinction matter for semantic theory?

Model answer: The key distinction is cancellability. Conversational implicatures are pragmatically derived from context and the cooperative principle — they can be cancelled without contradiction. Conventional implicatures are encoded in specific lexical items by convention and are non-cancellable. This matters for semantic theory because it forces a three-way distinction: truth-conditional content (what makes a sentence true), conventional implicature (conventionally encoded but non-truth-conditional), and conversational implicature (pragmatically derived). Without this distinction, the boundary between semantic encoding and pragmatic inference would be blurred.

The distinction clarifies where different aspects of meaning come from. 'Therefore' and 'moreover' and 'even' all carry meaning that is clearly part of the word's linguistic encoding — it doesn't vary with context and can't be retracted — yet it doesn't contribute to truth conditions. This is irreducibly a semantic phenomenon that can't be assimilated to either truth-conditional semantics or Gricean pragmatics alone. Grice himself coined the term 'conventional implicature' to capture this third category, and it remains central to debates in formal semantics and pragmatics.