Are 'conventional implicatures' implicatures?

Abstract

Under the Gricean distinction between the two components of an utterance’s total meaning, namely: what is said / what is implied, Grice himself considered that conventional implicature was in the realm of what is implied.
This article examines one of the misunderstandings related to the notion of conventional implicature. Bach (1999 and 2006b) contends that the phenomena regarded as conventional implicatures do not belong to the realm of what is implied and, therefore, they are not true implicatures. To reach this conclusion, Bach proposes an argument allegedly based on Grice’s definition of what is said. The aim of this paper is to refute this hypothesis, by showing that if we are really consistent with the Gricean approach – as Bach himself claims to be –, Bach’s arguments do not work and we must accept that conventional implicatures are true implicatures.