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Abstract Abstract: Utterance meaning has long been one of the most significant controversial issues in the philosophy of language, and much of this intense debate is connected to implicit meaning. If an element of utterance meaning which is clearly pragmatically derived, not encoded in the linguistic expression used, but depends on pragmatic principles geared to the recovery of the speaker’s communicative intention, is it an implicature or does it, rather, contribute to what is said? Griceans call it generalized conversational implicature, belongs to implicature. However, advocates of relevance theory argue that it should be known as explicature, is part of what is said. Furthermore, Bach who takes the middle road among the two schools puts forward a new notion: conversational impliciture, classifies it as an independent intermediate level between what is said and implicature. We presuppose that Bach’s views on the triple-division seems to be more plausible. However, his theoretical framework is imperfect, and therefore needs to be improved. Given this, on the basis of an analysis of the major relevant theories concerning meaning, this paper is an attempt to refine the impliciture concept by making some correction through a new definition of impliciture and discussion of the generative conditions and mechanism of understanding.
Key words: conversational impliciture; definitions; generative conditions; mechanism of understanding
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