APA Dictionary of Psychology

n. in linguistics, a proposition that is not stated explicitly in an utterance and is not a condition for its truth but can nevertheless be inferred from it. The types of implicature recognized in pragmatics and discourse analysis go beyond those recognized as valid in formal logic. For example, the statement Mary is my dad’s wife would imply in most contexts Mary is not my mother, even though the first proposition cannot be said to entail the second. Compare presupposition. See also conversational inference; indirect speech act. —implicative adj.