In sum, beliefs and attitudes are influential to the understanding of meaning in context. Speakers often express their beliefs or attitudes in an indirect way through word choices; and hearers often depend on their beliefs and attitudes in interpreting utterances.
2.2 Drawing Conclusions
In conversation, the hearer always draws conclusions about what the speaker tries to convey. Very often, the speaker’s message is not communicated explicitly, and the hearer needs to rely on all kinds of evidence and reasoning available in the context in order to interpret the message. Two kinds of conclusions that are made not strictly on the basis of what is literally said are implicature and entailment
Implicature
The term conversational implicature was introduced by H. Paul Grice. It is a concept closely related to the Cooperative Principle and the conversational maxims. Implicatures refer to the implications which are deduced from utterances, not on the basis of the literal meaning, but rather on thebasis of conversational maxims-the guidelines constitute the Cooperative Principle which governs the efficiency of communication (see more detail in Section 1). Thus, in –order to understand the implicature of an utterance, the hearer needs to take into account the knowledge about how people in the linguistic community cooperate in take into account the knowledge about how people in the linguistic community cooperate in order to make conversation work.