the speaker were in a position to make the stronger statement, they would have. Since (s)he did not, (s)he must believe that the stronger statement is not true. Examples Some examples of scalar implicature are: 1a. Bill has got some of Chomsky's papers. 1b. The speaker believes that Bill hasn't got all of Chomsky's papers. 2a. There will be five of us for dinner tonight. 2b. There won't be more than five of us for dinner tonight. 3a. She won't necessarily get the job. 3b. She will possibly get the job. 4a. The Russians or the Americans have just landed on Mars. 4b. Not both of them have just landed on Mars. Uttering the sentence (a) in most cases will communicate the assumption in (b). This seems to be because the speaker did not use stronger terms such as 'there will be more than five people for dinner tonight' or 'she can't possibly get the job'. For example, if Bill really did have all of Chomsky's papers, the speaker would have said so. However, according to the maxim of quantity, a speaker will only be informative as is required, and will therefore not use any stronger terms unless required. The hearer, knowing this, will assume that the stronger term does not apply. See also Cooperative principle Downward entailing Focus (linguistics) Logical consequence Entailment (pragmatics) Indirect speech act Subtrigging Implicate and explicate order Intrinsic and extrinsic properties References Robyn Carston, "Informativeness, Relevance and Scalar Implicature" . Chierchia G., Guasti M. T., Gualmini A., Meroni L., Crain S., Foppolo F. (2004). Semantic and pragmatic competence in children and adults comprehension of or. In Experimental Pragmatics, Eds. I. Noveck and D. Sperber, pag. 283-300, Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Laurence R. Horn. 1984. "A new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicature." In D. Schiffrin (ed.), Meaning, Form and Use in Context (GURT '84), 11-42. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Laurence R. Horn, 'A natural history of negation', 1989, University of Chicago Press: Chicago. Kepa Korta, 'Implicitures: Cancelability and Non-detachability', Angelika Kratzer, Scalar Implicatures: Are There Any? Workshop on Polarity, Scalar Phenomena, and Implicatures. University of Milan-Bicocca June 18, 2003 Ira Noveck, "When children are more logical than adults : experimental investigations of scalar implicature", Cognition 2001, vol. 78, no2, pp. 165–188. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, article "Implicature" Mante S. Nieuwland, Tali Ditman & Gina R. Kuperberg (2010). On the incrementality of pragmatic processing: