The Role of Implicated Meaning in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Language, Thought & Power

This paper navigates the multifaceted role of implicated meaning in George Orwell’s dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In order to do so, it applies Grice’s (1969) Cooperative Principle and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory as two frameworks to account for the ways in which interlocutors communicate beyond the literal. Under the rule of a totalitarian regime for whom there exists ”little distinction between the thought and the deed”, implicated meaning occupies a paradoxical position as a means to unify and to resist, yet at once to mislead and to deceive. Instrumental to Winston’s creation of a private linguistic realm free from the Party, the ambiguous nature of implicated meaning is equally capitalised on by O’Brien to lull an eager Winston into a false sense of security and solidarity. The paper thus argues that implicated meaning is a fundamental characteristic of thoughtcrime, with the recovery of implicatures becoming as incriminating as the act of implicating