Cases of Misunderstanding: Reasons why Conversational Implicatures Might Fail

The article reviews cases of unsuccessful implicatures and possible reasons for misunderstanding the speaker’s meaning. The focus is on explaining misunderstanding with the graded salience hypothesis. Under review are examples of cases where the conventional meaning and intended meaning differ thus resulting in a misunderstanding. The graded salience hypothesis offers an explanation of how we understand expressions based on personal preference priority, so the main argument made is that in cases of misunderstanding the speaker and the listener prioritize different meanings attributed to the same expression due to differences in knowledge, personal background, familiarity with the expression in particular usage, etc. There are also cases of scalar implicatures where the inference meaning is not always the same. In such cases, the speaker’s meaning could be misunderstood if the listener considers a different meaning of the scalar expression as more salient than the one the speaker wishes to convey.