Someone says 'I've had enough.' The hearer enriches this to mean 'I've had enough to eat.' This enriched content is best classified as:
AA Gricean conversational implicature — arising from cooperative communication norms and cancellable by explicit denial
BAn impliciture — pragmatically supplied content required for truth-evaluation, and not cancellable
CPart of the conventional semantic meaning of 'enough'
DA presupposition — assumed as background for the utterance
This is impliciture in Kent Bach's sense. It is NOT a Gricean implicature because it cannot be cancelled — 'I've had enough, but I don't mean enough of anything' is incoherent (option A fails: Gricean implicatures ARE cancellable). It is NOT part of the semantic meaning of 'enough' (option C). It is not a presupposition (option D). It is pragmatically supplied context that is required to make the utterance truth-evaluable — the hallmark of impliciture.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
Semantic minimalists and contextualists disagree about impliciture. Which statement correctly characterizes their disagreement?
AMinimalists say enrichment affects truth conditions; contextualists say it is purely post-semantic communication
BMinimalists say 'what is said' is the unenriched logical form; contextualists say the truth-evaluable proposition is always pragmatically enriched
CBoth accept that enrichment affects truth conditions but disagree about whether it is conscious or automatic
DMinimalists deny that pragmatic processes exist; contextualists deny that semantic content is stable across utterances
Semantic minimalists hold that the proposition strictly 'said' is the minimal semantic content fixed by linguistic convention — enrichment happens post-semantically in communication. Contextualists hold that the proposition actually evaluated for truth is always enriched by context, making semantics irreducibly context-dependent. Impliciture sits exactly at this fault line: it is pragmatically supplied, required for truth conditions, but not encoded conventionally.
Question 3 True / False
Unlike Gricean implicature, impliciture cannot be cancelled without producing incoherence.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
Cancellability is the defining mark of Gricean conversational implicature — you can say 'He finished the test, and I don't mean to suggest he finished on time.' But you cannot say 'John is ready, though I don't mean to imply he's ready for anything in particular' without incoherence. The enrichment is required for 'John is ready' to express a truth-evaluable proposition at all, making it non-cancellable and thus categorically distinct from implicature.
Question 4 True / False
Impliciture is simply another name for what Grice called conversational implicature — both refer to pragmatically communicated meaning that goes beyond the sentence's literal content.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Bach introduced 'impliciture' precisely to carve out a category Grice's framework obscures. Gricean implicature lies beyond what is said — it is additional content communicated alongside the proposition expressed. Impliciture enriches what is said — it affects the proposition itself and its truth conditions. Implicatures are cancellable; implicitures are not. They occupy different positions in the architecture of meaning: one post-semantic, one constitutive of content.
Question 5 Short Answer
Explain why impliciture creates a problem for the standard view that semantics and pragmatics can be cleanly separated.
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: The standard picture assigns semantics the job of determining truth-conditional content from linguistic form, and pragmatics the job of explaining what is communicated beyond that content. Impliciture breaks this picture: pragmatic enrichment processes operate inside the determination of what is said — they are needed to produce a truth-evaluable proposition at all. 'John is ready' has no truth-evaluable content without a contextually supplied completion, yet 'ready for X' is not part of the conventional meaning of 'ready.' Pragmatics does not merely add to a complete semantic output; it participates in generating that output. Semantics cannot deliver a complete truth-evaluable proposition without pragmatic input, collapsing the assumed sequential structure of the two levels.
This has downstream consequences for formal semantics: if truth conditions are always pragmatically enriched, a context-free semantics cannot correctly specify when sentences are true. The minimalism/contextualism debate is essentially a debate about how deep this entanglement goes and whether a useful notion of 'minimal semantic content' can be salvaged.