Introducing English Linguistics

cooperative principle
is violated. If speaker A asks Do you like my new shirt
and tie, and Speaker B replies I like the shirt, Speaker A will infer that
Speaker B did not like the tie because Speaker B failed to mention it in his
reply. In other words, Speaker B’s reply was not informative enough, lead-
ing to a conversational implicature.
cooperative principle:
The philosopher H. Paul Grice’s theory that communication among indi-
viduals is cooperative. He proposed various maxims specifying precisely
how communication is cooperative. For instance, his maxim of quantity
stipulates that what we say should be maximally informative: we should
not say too much or too little. If we violate a maxim, a conversational