This article provides a scientific and theoretical analysis of inference and implicature, which are regarded as central concepts of pragmatics, and reveals their interrelation as well as their common and distinctive features, while also explaining their role in the formation of pragmatic meaning. The article examines broad and narrow interpretations of inference and evaluates it as the listener’s mental and inferential activity carried out in the process of understanding utterance meaning on the basis of context, communicative situation, and shared knowledge, whereas implicature is characterized as an implicit meaning not directly expressed by the speaker but reconstructed precisely through this inferential process. In addition, the article demonstrates the close connection of implicature with the speaker’s communicative intention and substantiates that such factors as the listener’s inferential activity, presupposition, context, and speech situation play an important role in the emergence of this phenomenon. As a result, it is concluded that inference and implicature serve as an important theoretical basis not only for pragmatic analysis, but also for uncovering deeper layers of utterance meaning, identifying implicit meanings, and explaining the mechanism of mutual understanding between participants in communication.

inference, implicature, pragmatics, pragmatic meaning, explicature, communicative intention, Gricean theory, Relevance Theory.

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