Delineating how PCIs develop into GCIs from a cognition-pragmatics diachronic perspective: A case study of Chinese méimù

Nina Liang, Yanfei Zhang and Yuan Zhang
Shandong University | Shandong Normal University

The Gricean GCI-PCI divide has long been questioned in linguistic pragmatics. Taking Chinese méimù in the CCL corpus as the case, the present study proposes the cognition-pragmatics diachronic model to examine Grice’s GCI-PCI divide. It is found that with the frequency of repeated usage increasing over time, PCIs develop into GCIs; these two types of conversational implicatures are not easily divided. Semantic change from PCIs to GCIs is a dynamic process of cognition from individual entrenchment to collective conventionalization. By schematization and categorization, the former gradually builds an individual’s knowledge network with many entrenched PCI nodes, while the latter is reflected as sharing some parts of the individual’s knowledge network in the collective minds, i.e., the community’s knowledge network with some conventionalized GCI nodes, further forming socio-cultural conventions in a speech community. During this process, there is a division of labor between context and conventions. Therefore, the diachronic study sheds new light on the relationship between GCIs and PCIs.

Publication history

Date received: 24 May 2023

Date accepted: 6 June 2024

Published online: 21 January 2025

Table of contents

According to Grice’s classical theory, conversational implicatures are classified into generalized conversational implicatures (GCIs) and particularized conversational implicatures (PCIs). GCIs refer to the cases in which “the use of a certain form of words in an utterance would normally (in the absence of special circumstances) carry such-and-such an implicature or type of implicature” (Grice 1989, 37), while PCIs refer to the cases in which “an implicature is carried by saying that p on a particular occasion in virtue of special features of the context” (Grice 1989, 37). Defined thus, the difference between GCIs and PCIs is that the former are the implicatures that linguistic forms in a general context normally carry, whereas the latter are inferred in a particular context. The Gricean GCI-PCI divide has long been questioned in linguistic pragmatics. In order to make clear the relationship between GCIs and PCIs, this study intends to discuss Grice’s GCI-PCI divide from a diachronic perspective by adopting Chinese méimù in the CCL corpus as the data.

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