A speaker says 'Some of the students passed the exam.' According to Grice, why does this utterance implicate 'not all students passed'?
AThe word 'some' logically entails 'not all' by its semantic definition
BThe maxim of Quantity requires speakers to be as informative as needed; if all had passed, a cooperative speaker would have said so
CThe maxim of Quality prohibits making strong claims that might turn out to be false
DThe implicature arises because 'some' is ambiguous between 'a few' and 'most'
Saying 'some' when you know 'all' would be true violates the maxim of Quantity (be as informative as required). A hearer assumes the speaker is being cooperative, and since 'all' is a stronger and more informative claim, the speaker's choice of 'some' implicates they cannot honestly say 'all.' Note that 'some' does NOT logically entail 'not all' — 'some, and in fact all' is not a contradiction, which is exactly what makes this an implicature rather than an entailment.
Question 2 True / False
Conversational implicatures are a type of logical entailment because, like entailments, they follow necessarily from the meaning of the sentence.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
The key difference is cancellability. Entailments cannot be retracted without contradiction: 'John's sister arrived, but he has no siblings' is incoherent. Implicatures can be cancelled without contradiction: 'Some students passed — in fact, all of them did' is perfectly coherent. Implicatures arise from reasoning about the speaker's communicative intentions in context, not from the logical content of the words alone.
Question 3 Short Answer
What does it mean to say an implicature is 'cancellable,' and why is cancellability the key test for distinguishing implicatures from entailments? Give an example.
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Cancellability means the speaker can explicitly deny the implied meaning without creating a logical contradiction. For example, 'Some students passed — in fact, all of them did' cancels the 'not all' implicature that 'some' normally generates, yet the sentence is entirely coherent. By contrast, entailments cannot be cancelled: 'Mary stopped smoking, but she never smoked' is a contradiction because 'stopped smoking' logically entails prior smoking. Cancellability proves that the 'not all' inference was pragmatic (context-dependent reasoning) rather than semantic (part of the word's logical meaning).
Cancellability is the diagnostic Grice identified to separate what is said (the literal semantic content, including entailments) from what is implicated (pragmatic inferences defeasible by context). This distinction is foundational for linguistic pragmatics because it explains why the same sentence can communicate very different things in different contexts.