Questions: What Is Said (Grice)

Question 1

A politician says 'I never took money illegally.' A critic accuses her of dishonestly claiming she took no money at all. Using Grice's framework, what is the most precise analysis of this statement?

• A. The statement is true and implies nothing about legal money-taking — the critic is misreading it
• B. What is said is only that no illegal money was taken; the claim that no money was taken at all is an implicature that can be cancelled without contradiction — the statement may be technically true while being intentionally misleading
• C. Because implicature is not truth-conditional, the statement cannot be analyzed using Grice's framework
• D. The statement violates the maxim of quantity by providing less information than expected

Answer: (B)

This is Grice's framework at its most consequential. What is *said* is: the speaker took no money illegally. This is a truth-conditional claim that can be verified or falsified. What is *implicated* — based on the maxim of quantity (be as informative as required) and the cooperative assumption — is that the speaker took no money, period. But this implicature is defeasible: adding 'I took legal consulting fees' cancels the implicature without contradicting the literal statement. The politician's statement is technically non-contradictory while being strategically misleading through implicature. Option D is partially correct about quantity but misses the central what-is-said/implicature distinction.

Question 2

Which of the following best describes Grice's 'defeasibility' test for implicature?

• A. An implicature is false if the speaker explicitly denies it in a follow-up statement
• B. An implicature can be cancelled by adding further information without the speaker contradicting themselves — showing it was communicated but not literally part of what was said
• C. Defeasibility means a literal statement can be proven false in court by showing its context was misleading
• D. Defeasibility means the hearer is free to ignore an implicature if it seems implausible

Answer: (B)

Defeasibility is the key diagnostic test distinguishing implicature from what is said. If you can add a clause that cancels the implied meaning without producing a contradiction, the cancelled content was an implicature, not part of what was said. Example: 'Some students passed — in fact, all of them did' cancels the implicature of 'not all' without contradiction. Compare: 'I never took money illegally — in fact, I did take money illegally' is a contradiction because it contradicts what was said, not an implicature. What is said cannot be cancelled; implicature can.

Question 3

In Grice's framework, what is said is the literal, truth-conditional content of an utterance — the part that must be true for the sentence to count as true — and it is distinct from everything else communicated through implicature.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This is the core of Grice's semantic/pragmatic distinction. What is said is the proposition that makes the utterance true or false — it requires resolving reference and disambiguating meaning, but it stays close to the linguistic content of the words. Everything communicated beyond that — the additional layer generated by applying the cooperative maxims to the context — is implicature. This division is what grounds pragmatics as a discipline: it gives us a principled way to say what language *means* versus what a speaker *communicates* by using it in a context.

Question 4

Because implicature goes beyond what is literally said, speakers can seldom be held responsible for misleading listeners through implicature — mainly for the literal content of their words.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This is a misapplication of the what-is-said/implicature distinction. Grice's framework shows that implicature is an intentional communicative act — speakers intend hearers to draw the implicature, and hearers recognize this intention. A politician who says 'I never took money illegally' and thereby implicates they took no money at all is deliberately exploiting the gap between what is said and what is communicated. Misleading through implicature while technically stating only truths is a recognized form of dishonesty, studied in legal interpretation, political communication, and ethics of speech.

Question 5

Explain the defeasibility test and why it is useful for distinguishing what is said from what is implicated. Give an example in your explanation.

Model answer: The defeasibility test checks whether a communicated meaning can be cancelled without contradiction. If adding more information removes the implied meaning without making the original statement self-contradictory, the cancelled content was an implicature, not part of what was said. Example: 'Some students passed — in fact, all of them did.' The word 'some' implicates 'not all,' but 'in fact, all of them' cancels that implicature without contradiction, proving it was implicated, not said. Contrast: 'It's raining — actually it isn't raining' is a contradiction because what is said cannot be cancelled.

The defeasibility test is powerful because it gives a concrete, operational procedure for a concept that might otherwise seem abstract. Rather than trying to introspect about 'what I really meant,' you test whether adding a cancellation clause produces a contradiction. If it does, the content was part of what was said. If it doesn't, the content was implicated. This test also reveals why misleading through implicature is structurally different from lying: a lie involves asserting a false what-is-said; misleading through implicature exploits the defeasible gap between saying and communicating.