Cancelability of Implicatures in Political Discourse

Document Type : Scientific research papers

Author

Department of English Language - College of Arts - Damietta University

Abstract

Grice (1975) devised some tests to discriminate conversational implicatures from other forms of utterances. One of these tests is the cancelability test. Different scholars supported Grice’s test, whereas others doubted the validity of this test. The current study sought to investigate the test of cancelability of implicatures in political discourse. Biden’s press conference on the 16th of June 2021 was chosen to be the context of exploring the cancelability test. 15 utterances were chosen randomly from this press conference to be the items of a questionnaire that was directed to specialists in the field of linguistics. The results indicated that all the conventional implicatures are non-cancelable, whereas 6 out of 18 conversational implicatures are detected to be non-cancelable. No specific semantic, syntactic, or pragmatic features characterize the non-cancelable implicatures. Similarly, it is noted that non-cancelable implicatures could be canceled in any other context but not in the same political context.

Keywords