How We Derive Pragmatic Implicatures?

How do listeners understand speakers’ utterances? Do listeners just understand the literal meaning of speakers’ words, or they are able to comprehend the implicatures if there are some?

Consider the following dialogue:

A: Did you use up my tissues?

B: I used some of them.

Barner (2011) points out that A, as an adult, should be able to infer that B did not use up all his tissues. The inference in this dialogue is a type of “scalar implicature”. In order to derive this type scalar implicature, the knowledge about “some” and “all” is required so that scalar alternatives can be generated. This knowledge is rarely seen among preschool children. Therefore, they have difficulty in computing scalar implicatures. Similar conclusions are also drawn by Stiller (2011). Stiller further discovers that preschool children have already developed pragmatic inference competence because they perform well in the tasks involving real-world contextual scales. Stiller concludes that a successful computation of pragmatic implicatures involves the knowledge about the world, the knowledge of the language, and the knowledge of other people.

I think we can find many examples in the real world to support Stiller’s conclusion. For example, if the dialogue above happens in an apartment and there is a third person C living in this apartment, what implicatures might B’s answer contain? Based on the knowledge of the language and shared knowledge of the situation and the person C, A should be able to infer that B did not use up all his tissues and C also used some of his tissues.

I also find that some companies take advantage of our pragmatic inference competence to make advertisement. The following picture is an advertisement of MacDonald’s in China.

The sentence consisted of big characters means “‘energetic’ beef makes you feel more energetic”. The chart and some sentences consisted of small characters at the bottom of the advertisement describe the nutrition value that beef contains. There is also a line written in small characters that “MacDonald’s has launched a new product: Beef burgers. Come to enjoy this delicious food!”

MacDonald’s is a famous brand from the United States, representing a higher standard of living. With this recognition, and the knowledge of the Chinese language and the knowledge about beef’s nutrition value, many Chinese tend to make such an inference:

                (1)   Beef contains rich nutrition.

                (2)   Eating good beef makes people feel healthy.

                (3)   MacDonald’s is a famous brand from the US and they have beef burgers.

                (4)   The beef burger in MacDonald’s must be nutritious and good for health.

In the above advertisement, MacDonald’s does not explicitly say that their beef burgers are nutritious and good for health. But they successfully lead Chinese people to make such an inference by taking advantage of the way how we derive pragmatic implicatures.