The meaning of ‘because’ on a Gricean view

Grice’s concern with utterance meaning was to define criteria that serve to draw a line between semantics and pragmatics. A class of words that have traditionally posed a challenge to his cause is sentence connectives. While Grice put a number of connectives under his microscope, his discussion of causal connectives basically focused on ‘therefore’ rather than other widely applied causal connectives—for instance ‘because’. Could Grice’s framework of analysis support an adequate treatment of the connective in question? In pursuit of an answer to this question, the aim of this paper is to restore proper regard for a meaning description of prototypical causal meaning, as this is encoded in because within the Gricean model; at the same time, the paper attempts to provide feedback on the sustainability of the model. It ultimately concludes that, unlike ‘therefore’, ‘because’ cannot be treated as a case of conventional implicature.