Speaker A’s utterance flouts cooperative maxim (s)
Speaker B observes speaker A’s flouting of cooperative maxim (s)
Speaker B assumes speaker A a cooperative speaker
Speaker B observes speaker A’s flouting is deliberate
Speaker B observes a conversational implicature in speaker A’s utterance
Speaker B retrieves and deciphers the conversational implicature
In the case where the speaker violates a cooperative maxim in order to produce a conversational implicature, the hearer should be able to infer the implicature. The hearer has to follow a certain procedure to infer the speaker’s implicature; this procedure can be summarized in five steps which are explained in the figure above