Criteria for Distinguishing Presuppositions and Conventional Implicatures

Abstract

This article explores conventional implicatures and presuppusitions as the main parts of utterance’s content expressing its implied meaning. The article considers a discussion around taxonomy of meaning types, which is an important problem for the philosophy of language. The main shared properties of these semantic components are examined on various examples: projection, conventionality, and non-cancellability. The article provides a criteria for differentiation of these parts od meaning: implicatures are speaker-oriented. This unique semantic property is explained within the epistemic approach using the concepts of common knowledge and agent’s beliefs. At the end, the logical explanation of the differences between conventional implicatures and presuppositions is compared with the theory of impositions and formal discursive approach.