Definition of "implicature" [implicature]

• The aspect of meaning that a speaker conveys, implies, or suggests without directly expressing. Although the utterance "Can you pass the salt?” is literally a request for information about one's ability to pass salt, the understood implicature is a request for salt. (noun)
• The process by which such a meaning is conveyed, implied, or suggested. In saying "Some dogs are mammals,” the speaker conveys by implicature that not all dogs are mammals. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "For Grice, irony is an overt violation of the maxim of truthfulness, and differs from metaphor and hyperbole only in the kind of implicature it conveys (metaphor implicates a simile based on what was said, hyperbole implicates a weakening of what was said, and irony implicates the opposite of what was said)."
• "There was a question on NPR News today that asked (partially through implicature) why did this guy talk, when we needed torture to get the other guys to talk?"
• "Now, the fact that one gets this implicature, that only two sounds so much better than only one thousand, ought to suggest that there is logic underlying the construction."