IMPLICATURES IN FICTION TEXTS

Abstract

The article considers implicatures of utterances. An implicature is information complex which is literally (verbally) unexpressed and which can be elicited as a result of extracting the meaning using background knowledge of recipient, context and situation. Formation and understanding the meaning of an utterance is the process of extracting implied meaning which is formed by interaction of linguistic units with constituents of cognitive environment. An utterance therefore can be considered as a speech stimulus involving the knowledge from cognitive environment to form the meaning of the utterance. Extracting the meaning is (that is, eliciting an implicature) is important for communicion. The purpose of the research was to study various aspects of implicatures: the way of extracting the meaning, describing different types and obtaining statistical data of different types implicatures usage. In particular, our research demonstrates statistical prevalence of contextual implicatures. The results of the paper can be of some interest for experts in linguopragmatics and psycholinguisics.