WHAT IS SAID, WHAT IS IMPLICITED, WHAT IS IMPLICATED

Abstract

Before embarking on our analysis of Grice’s concept of Conversational Implicature and, above all, of the problems with this theory, we will describe the three types of source of knowledge that provide a contextual background for understanding utterances.
There are three main sources for the knowledge a speaker has to estimate, i.e. ‘knowledge as context’ (a speaker chooses how to make references to an entity making estimations of what his/her listeners knows).
The three main sources are:
•the physical context;
•what has already been said;
•background or common knowledge.
The first source refers to deictic expressions.