International Journal of Philology

The paper focuses on the triggers of conventional implicatures referring to the human age description in English-based literary discourse. The study aims at identifying the conventional implicatures triggered by temporal adverbs in their age modifying functions. To achieve the purpose, the paper has applied the set of methods: the Grice's and neo-Gricean inferential pragmatics to inference conversational implicatures triggered by temporal adverbs; form / function pragmatics in elucidating conventionally embedded pragmatic meanings as well as some elements of stylistic and contextual interpretation analyses of a literary text. The major findings refer to the identification of the most frequent adverbial modifiers triggering the conventional implicatures in the age-related narrations in English-based literary discourse. The identified triggers encompass the temporal adverbs still, just, suddenly and recently, which actualize the conventional implicatures due to their presuppositional component of "time continuance" correlating with age semes. The most frequent marker of embedded conventional meanings is the adverb still in its semantic components "so far" and "even if”. Age-related conventional implicatures usually modify the age descriptors of appearance (with the implicature: “at that age, people usually don't look so good”) and behavior (with the implicature: at this age, people usually do not behave this way”). Much less frequent are conventional implicatures, associated with age-bound feelings or physical well-being. The perspective of the undertaken research is the study of the conventional implicatures in the characters’ conversational speech of English-based literary discourse

conventional implicature; age-related meanings; temporal adverbs; pragmatic; literary discourse