What are Conversational Implicatures in Linguistics?

𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝘾𝙤𝙣𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙄𝙢𝙥𝙡𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚𝙨 𝙞𝙣 𝙇𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙪𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙨?

An implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed. Implicatures can aid in communicating more efficiently than by explicitly saying everything we want to communicate. This phenomenon is part of pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics.
Conversational implicature refers to the inference a hearer makes about a speaker’s intended meaning that Discourse and arises from their use of the literal meaning of what the speaker said the conversational principle and its maxims. For example, if I say, ‘There’s nothing on at the movies’ I do not mean ‘nothing at all, but rather ‘nothing that I’m interested in seeing. The person I am speaking to will assume this and ‘implicate’ my meaning. Implicature is not the same, however, as inference. As Thomas (1995: 58) explains, an implicature ‘is generated intentionally by the speaker and may (or may not) be understood by the hearer’. An inference, on the other hand, is produced by a hearer on the basis of certain evidence and may not, in fact, be the same as what a speaker intends.