6 Assessing productive and interactive skills Personal refl ection

 Part 
II
1 the maxim of quality: say only what you know to be true;
2 the maxim of quantity: give all the information that the addressee 
needs (but not more);
3 the maxim of relation: be relevant (to the topic or setting);
4 the maxim of manner: be unambiguous, brief, clear and orderly.
If the addressee perceives that all four maxims are being followed, he 
or she will tend to take what the addresser says at face value: the most 
obvious explicit meaning is the intended meaning. Through what 
Grice termed 
implicature
, violation or ‘fl outing’ of the maxims implies 
that something else is intended. In the example above of the mother 
rebuking her daughter by saying ‘
Good evening, madam
’, the mother 
violates the maxims of quality and relevance because both participants 
are aware that it is morning, not evening (quality) and that formal 
greetings are not appropriate to the context (manner). These violations 
of the maxims signal to the daughter that her mother is being sarcastic.
Leech (1983), who was concerned with the rules that govern politeness, 
also put forward conversational maxims. These cover issues such as tact, 
generosity and agreement. The agreement principle, for example, states: 
‘minimize the expression of disagreement between self and other; maximize 
the expression of agreement between self and other’. This maxim explains 
why an utterance such as ‘
Yes.
You are so right
’ is interpreted as being 
more polite than ‘
No. You’re completely wrong
’ (even if the fi rst of these 
would fl out Grice’s maxim of quality). Of course, people do disagree; but 
in order to maintain politeness they often try to mitigate the effect by 
being indirect or by apologising: ‘
I’m sorry, but I don’t really follow your 
point
’ or ‘
I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with you
.’
Task 6.2
Pragmatic considerations such as politeness and implicature present 
diffi culties for assessment designers. Although they are certainly very 
important to communication and should play a part in its assessment, 
they are not as stable as grammatical rules and can be quite 
idiosyncratic. Some people are more ready to perceive violations of 
politeness than others. If an addressee takes offence when a non-
native speaker of English asks: ‘
Could I borrow your book?
’ instead of 
‘
I was just wondering if you have the book and I could borrow it?
’, as in 
Fulcher’s (2003) example, is this because the speaker is being rude or 
because the addressee is being over-sensitive?
Another problem is that these issues may be as much a matter of 
culture as they are of language. Native speakers of English in India do not 
necessarily share the same politeness conventions as native speakers of 
English in New Zealand or in Jamaica. A 25-year-old may not recognise 
the same politeness conventions as his 75-year-old neighbour.

---