The paper begins with a brief introduction, followed by the literature review。 Then some examples extracted from Sherlock Season One will be analyzed in detail according to the maxims they violate。 After that, three main functions of conversational implicature in the play will be discussed。 Finally, it comes to a conclusion。

2。 Literature Review文献综述

     The notion of implicature was originated by the Oxford philosopher H。 P。 Grice in 1957 in an essay titled as meaning (Grice, 66-88)。 He mentioned it as a way of expressing extra meaning beyond words。 The central ideas were introduced by him in the William lectures delivered at Harvard in 1967。 In order to explain the mechanisms by which people interpret conversational implicature, Grice introduced the Cooperative Principle。 He further added to it four maxims, which are Maxim of Quality, Maxim of Quantity, Maxim of Relation and Maxim of Manner。 Conversational implicature occurs when speakers violate one or more of the maxims without abandoning the CP。 Grice’s theory of conversational implicature is known as Classic Gricean Conversational Implicature Theory and is one of the single most important ideas in pragmatics (Huang, 25)。 Succeeding to Grice, many researches have been conducted on conversational implicature。 Among them is a famous one done by Jeff Speaks who explores uses of language in thought and communication via Grice’s theory of conversational implicature (Speaks, 2008)。

     Conversational implicature is also a frequent subject in Chinese people’s studies。 At the very beginning, scholars use conversational implicature to analyze daily communications in our life。 Later, people use novels as the background of conversational implicature researches。 One example is Yang Liu’s study of conversational implicature in Pride and Prejudice (Yang, 2016)。 Now, scholars cast their eyes on films and TV dramas due to their prevalence。 Conversational implicature in some films have been analyzed, such as the analysis of conversational implicature in Pirates of the Cribbean。 Besides, some TV series like the Big Bang Theory have become valuable materials for studying conversational implicature and humor produced by violating Cooperative Principle。 Wang Zheng, a scholar from Shandong University, has interpreted the verbal humor in Big Bang Theory from the perspective of conversational implicature (Wang, 2013)。

Since Sherlock first showed up on the screen, it has caught many people’s eyes。 The audience is fascinated by the wonderful detective stories and the excellent performances of the actors。 So hot is Sherlock that many scholars become interested in it and thus carry on various researches on it。 These researches are done from different perspectives, ranging from the study of its characters, stories and texts to the study of its costumes, shooting and editing。 One relevant research is Wang Fei’s paper on the editing of Sherlock (Wang, 122-126)。 The researches also involve different fields, such as literature, arts, marketing and linguistics。  Though many studies on Sherlock have been done from the perspective of linguistics，the notion of conversational implicature is rarely seen in related papers。 A scholar named Zhang Yiran has made a pragmatic analysis on Sherlock (Zhang, 197-200)。 Nevertheless, conversational implicature only occupies a small part in his paper。 

This paper focuses on the conversation implicature in Sherlock Season One and also attempts to explore the corresponding functions of it。