Published (2017) in Piotr Cap and Marta Dynel (eds.), Implicitness: From Lexis to Discourse (pp.281-304), John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Implicature and the inferential substrate Michael Haugh The University of Queensland What is said is always silhouetted by the penumbra of the unsaid (Welch 2005) Abstract Implicatures are generally conceptualised as additional thoughts, beliefs, intentions and desires that are intended by the speaker to be recognised by the hearer as intended by the speaker. However, implicatures are not simply cognitive constructs, but in being accomplished by persons in interaction, are arguably social actions in their own right. In this chapter, it is proposed that a proper account of implicature needs to be developed with respect to the broader inferential substrate from which implicatures arise. It is suggested that while the inferables that make up this inferential substrate generally remain embedded, that is, where talk progresses without participants orienting to the action that is accomplished through the inferable as an object of interactional business, they may, on occasion, be exposed by those participants as the focus of interactional business in that sequence. It is then proposed that a range of practices license participants to expose an inferable (or set of inferables), including instances of “prompting”, where a speaker positions another participant to make a pre-emptive offer through reporting (possible) troubles, difficulties or needs. It is concluded that given through implicating participants can implicitly orient to both moral and relational concerns, our understanding of implicatures should thus not be divorced from the inferential substrate of interaction in which they are invariably locally situated. Keywords: implicature, inference, intention, social action, interactional pragmatics 1. Implicature and inference The notion of implicature was first introduced by the philosopher Paul Grice in order to discuss instances in which what a speaker means goes beyond the meaning literally expressed by a particular utterance in communication (Grice [1975]1989). The term ‘implicature’ was specifically coined by Grice to exclude logical implications and focus on the ordinary language sense of implying as “expressing indirectly”, “insinuating” and “hinting at” and so on. Many scholars have combined this work on implicature with Grice’s (1957, 1969) seminal work on speaker meaning as attained through the recognition of communicative intentions, leading to the common view that implicatures pertain to additional thoughts, beliefs, intentions, desires and so on that are intended by the speaker to be recognised (by the hearer) as intended by the speaker (Bach 2012; Bianchi 2013; Horn 2004; Levinson 2000), a 1