conversational implicature

Saul (2002) criticizes a view on the relationship between speaker meaning and conversational implicatures according to which speaker meaning is exhaustively comprised of what is said and what is implicated. In the course of making her points, she develops a couple of new notions which she calls “utterer-implicature” and “audience-implicature”. She then makes certain claims about the relationship between the intersection of those two notions and successful communication and also about the difference between conversational implicature and the intersection of utterer and audience implicatures. Finally, she tries to figure out the role and importance of conversational implicature in communication. Her claim on this issue is that conversational implicature plays a normative role in communication. In this paper, I will introduce her views on the above issues and critically engage some of them. I will show that her identification of successful communication with the intersection of utterer and audience implicatures is wrong. I will then show that her views on the difference between conversational implicature and the intersection of utterer and audience implicature run to several problems. Finally, appealing to what she says in Saul (2010) I try to make her claim about the normative character of conversational implicature more accurate.

The present study aimed to examine the translatorchr('39')s solutions to the translation of conversational implicatures from English into Persian. To do so, 120 conversational implicatures were extracted from the novel the Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 1954) and classified based on Gricechr('39')s (1975) categorization of Maxims, including quality, quantity, relevance, and manner. Mur Duenaschr('39')s (2003) taxonomy of translation strategies was used as a valid framework to find out the translation strategies the translator employed to transfer the 120 conversational implicatures. Furthermore, the most /least frequent translation strategies applied by the translator were investigated. At the end, the effectiveness of the source text (ST)-and target text (TT)-oriented strategies in transferring the same meaning of implicatures to the target text was determined. As the results indicate, the translator employed five out of six of Mur Duenaschr('39')s translation strategies, namely TL cultural cognate, SL cultural and linguistic borrowing, replacement of the SL cultural reference by explanation, TL cultural reference suppression, and TL cultural reference literal translation, of which SL cultural and linguistic borrowing and replacement of the SL cultural reference by explanation were the most/least frequently-used strategies. Moreover, the translator preferred to employ the ST-oriented strategies rather than the TT-oriented ones that referred to the employment of the ST-oriented strategy for the whole text. Based on Gricechr('39')s theory, the researcher concluded that the ST-oriented strategies were more effective than the TT-oriented ones and helped the translator to produce comprehensible translations and convey the meaning of implicatures to the target readers.