a proposition inferred from the circumstances of utterances of another proposition rather than from its literal meaning, as when an academic referee writes the candidate's handwriting is excellent to convey that he or she has nothing relevant to commend
2.
the relation between the uttered and the inferred statement
conversational implicature in American English
noun
Philosophy & Linguistics
an inference that can be drawn from an utterance, as from one that is seemingly illogical or irrelevant, by examining the degree to which it conforms to the canons of normal conversation and the way it functions pragmatically within the situation, as when “The phone is ringing,” said in a situation where both speaker and listener can clearly hear the phone, can be taken as a suggestion to answer the phone
Word origin
[1970–75]This word is first recorded in the period 1970–75. Other words that entered Englishat around the same time include: Heimlich maneuver, New Age, consciousness-raising, relational database, salsa
Examples of 'conversational implicature' in a sentence
conversational implicature
Couching his defence in philosophical terminology, he claimed to have been teaching his assistant an important distinction between 'logical implication and conversational implicature'.