Implicature in the context of "Paul Grice"

In philosophy and linguistics, the denotation of a word or expression is its strictly literal meaning. For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of having high temperature. Denotation is contrasted with other aspects of meaning, in particular connotation. For instance, the word "warm" may evoke calmness, coziness, or kindness (as in the warmth of someone's personality) but these associations are not part of the word's denotation. Similarly, an expression's denotation is separate from pragmatic inferences it may trigger. For instance, describing something as "warm" often implicates that it is not hot, but this is once again not part of the word's denotation.

Denotation plays a major role in several fields. Within semantics and philosophy of language, denotation is studied as an important aspect of meaning. In mathematics and computer science, assignments of denotations are assigned to expressions are a crucial step in defining interpreted formal languages. The main task of formal semantics is to reverse engineer the computational system which assigns denotations to expressions of natural languages.

In linguistics and the philosophy of language, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).

Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature, speech acts, relevance and conversation, as well as nonverbal communication. Theories of pragmatics go hand-in-hand with theories of semantics, which studies aspects of meaning, and syntax, which examines sentence structures, principles, and relationships. Pragmatics, together with semantics and syntactics, is a part of semiotics. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. In 1938, Charles Morris first distinguished pragmatics as an independent subfield within semiotics, alongside syntax and semantics. Pragmatics emerged as its own subfield in the 1950s after the pioneering work of J. L. Austin and Paul Grice.

Linguistic entailments are entailments which arise in natural language. If a sentence A entails a sentence B, sentence A cannot be true without B being true as well. For instance, the English sentence "Pat is a fluffy cat" entails the sentence "Pat is a cat" since one cannot be a fluffy cat without being a cat. On the other hand, this sentence does not entail "Pat chases mice" since it is possible (if unlikely) for a cat to not chase mice.

Entailments arise from the semantics of linguistic expressions. Entailment contrasts with the pragmatic notion of implicature. While implicatures are fallible inferences, entailments are enforced by lexical meanings plus the laws of logic. Entailments also differ from presuppositions, whose truth is taken for granted. The classic example of a presupposition is the existence presupposition which arises from definite descriptions. For example, the sentence "The king of France is bald" presupposes that there is a king of France. Unlike an entailment, presuppositions survive when the sentence is negated. The negation test can be used to determine the difference between entailment and presupposition. For instance, "The king of France is not bald" likewise presupposes that there is a king of France.