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Conversational Implicatures and Fictional Discourse

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  • Enrique Aranda Murillo
Enrique Aranda Murillo
Universidad de Granada, Granada, España
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36446/af.e1249

Published 2026-02-24

Keywords

  • Implicatura Conversacional,
  • Ficción,
  • Grice,
  • Pragmática,
  • Discurso de Ficción,
  • Narratividad
    • ...More
    Less
  • Conversational Implicatures,
  • Fiction,
  • Grice,
  • Pragmatics,
  • Fictional Discourse,
  • Tellability
    • ...More
    Less
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Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the Gricean model of conversational implicature, although widely used to analyze fictional discourse, needs to be adapted to the particular communicative aims of such discourse. I show, through an example of conversational implicature in a fictional story, that working out implicatures is problematic in some cases, and I attribute this difficulty to the fact that, while in ordinary conversations the maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner serve the conversational goal of maximizing the efficient exchange of information, in fictional discourse the primary goal is to endow the discourse with tellability. The traditional maxims, therefore, do not align with the communicative objective of fictional discourse. To account for these problematic cases, I propose introducing a new maxim, the Maxim of Narrativity, which states that the author should aim to maximize the narrative quality of the story. In this way, I extend the Gricean framework without significant theoretical cost, preserving its usefulness for the analysis of communication in fictional contexts.

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