maxims, it is useful to examine some examples that adhere to and vio-
late them.
Quantity
All communicants must strike a balance between providing too much and
too little information when they speak or write. In the example below,
both speakers achieve this balance because they directly answer each of
the questions they are asked.
A: Have any of the supervisors been in
B: Oh yeah I’ve had a lot of visitors lately um I went downstairs to get
something to eat and somebody was waiting at the door today
A: Who was it
B: John Wood do you know him
A: No
B: He was um
A: Is he an old guy
B: No
no kind of a young black guy
(ICE-USA)
Speaker B, for instance, directly answers A’s question about whether any
supervisors had come in. B provides slightly more information than nec-
essary, saying that many visitors had come in. But this extra information
does not exceed the amount of detail that would be provided in a conver-
sation of this nature.
In the next example, in contrast, too much information is provided. In
this example, a former Democratic Congressman in the United States,
Richard Gephardt, is responding to a question from a reporter asking him
whether he thought that George Bush was the legitimate president of the
United States, since Bush’s election victory in 2000 followed a highly con-
tentious and controversial recount of votes in the state of Florida. Instead
of giving a simple yes/no response to the
question followed by a brief
explanation, Gephardt provides a very lengthy answer:
The electors are going to elect George W. Bush to be the next presi-
dent of the United States, and I believe on January 20, not too many
steps from here, he’s going to be sworn in as the next president of the
United States. I don’t know how you can get more legitimate than
that.
Gephardt could have simply replied, “Yes, I think that George W. Bush was
legitimately elected.” However, because his party, the Democrats, had vig-
orously contested Bush’s election and lost a legal challenge to the
Republican party, many will interpret the length
of his utterance as mean-
ing that he does not think that George Bush is the legitimate president of
the United States.
Quality
When we communicate, there is a tacit assumption that what each com-
municant says or writes will be truthful. For instance, when speaker A
The social context of English
57
below asks B who she is going to spend the evening with, A expects B to
give a truthful answer.
A: So who are you going out with tonight
B: Koosh and Laura
(SBCSAE)
This may seem like a fairly obvious point, but conversational implicatures
definitely result when an utterance is judged as not being truthful. The
excerpt below was taken from the first
page of a marketing survey
enclosed with a child’s toy:
Please take a moment to let us know something about yourself. Your
valuable input enables us to continue to develop our advanced learning
tools.
Following this statement were a series of questions eliciting informa-
tion not just about the quality of the toy but about the occupations of
household members, their annual income, the kinds of automobiles
they drove, and so forth. In this context, many people will interpret the
above statement as less than truthful: the manufacturer is not solely
interested in improving its “advanced learning tools.” Instead, it wants
to gather demographic information about the parents who purchased
the toy so that they can be targeted in the future with advertisements
for other toys.
Even though communicants place great faith in the truth of the asser-
tions
that they make and hear, there are certain situations when violating
the Quality Maxim is considered acceptable. For instance, if someone asks
you “Do you like my new hairstyle?”, it would be highly inappropriate in
most contexts to reply “No,” since this could result in hurt feelings.
Therefore, in most communicative contexts, many people would reply
“Yes” or “It’s great,” even if their replies are untruthful. Of course, the per-
son to whom the reply is directed would undoubtedly judge the reply as
truthful. But as will be noted in a later section, politeness is such an
important pragmatic concept in English that it overrides other pragmatic
considerations.
Relation
The notion of what is relevant in discourse will
vary from one context to
another. For instance, in the conversation below, speaker B asks A if he
started his new job. However, a few turns later, B changes the topic entire-
ly, cutting off any further discussion of A’s job and shifting the topic to a
phone call B had received the previous night:
B: Are you um how’s your new job did you start
A: I just was painting and I do a little carpentry a little gutter work and
stuff
B: Uh huh
A: So I’ve been doing that
B: Someone called for you last night
58
INTRODUCING ENGLISH LINGUISTICS
A: Really
B: Yeah
A: Who was it
B: But I told him you were you weren’t
working here anymore
(ICE-USA)
In casual conversation, such topic shifts are normal, since there are no
real pre-planned topics that people intend to discuss when they converse
casually and in many instances we are free to change topics, digress, etc.,
without violating the maxim of relation.
In other contexts, however, it is expected that speakers/writers stay on
topic. Note how in the two examples below, which were taken from class
lectures, instructors specifically note that they are going to go off topic by
uttering statements like
let me digress a little here that
tell their students
explicitly that they are aware that what they say next will not be directly
relevant to the previous topic of discussion:
okay then obviously basic biology failed
let me digress a
little here
. um, there is no fundamental physical set of principles to
describe, the precise effect, of temperature on enzyme catalyzed reac-
tions in real organisms.
(MICASE LES175SU025)
okay. any other questions? if not let me leave this model, and i wanna
start talking about the Static Neoclassical Model. but before i do that
i
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