implicature a pragmatic relation different from, but easily confused with, the semantic relation of entailment. This concept was first identified, explained, and used by H. P. Grice (Studies in the Way of Words, 1989). Grice identified two main types of implicature, conventional and conversational. A speaker is said to conversationally implicate a proposition P in uttering a given sentence, provided that, although P is not logically implied by what the speaker says, the assumption that the speaker is attempting cooperative communication warrants inferring that the speaker believes p. If B says, ‘There is a garage around the corner’ in response to A’s saying, ‘I am out of gas,’ B conversationally implicates that the garage is open and has gas to sell. Grice identifies several conversational maxims to which cooperative speakers may be expected to conform, and which justify inferences about speakers’ implicatures. In the above example, the implicatures are due to the Maxim of Relevance. Another important maxim is that of Quantity (‘Make your contribution as informative as is required’). Among implicatures due to the Maxim of Quantity are scalar implicatures, wherein the sentence uttered contains an element that is part of a quantitative scale. Utterance of such a sentence conversationally implicates that the speaker does not believe related propositions higher on the scale of informativeness. For instance, speakers who say, ‘Some of the zoo animals escaped,’ implicate that they do not believe that most of the zoo animals escaped, or that all of the zoo animals escaped. Unlike conversational implicatures, conventional implicatures are due solely to the meaning of the sentence uttered. A sentence utterance is said by Grice to conventionally implicate a proposition, p, if the meaning of the sentence commits the speaker to p, even though what the sentence says does not entail p. Thus, uttering ‘She was poor but she was honest’ implicates, but does not say, that there is a contrast between poverty and honesty. See also PRESUPPOSITIO. M.M.