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2. The Cooperative principle and Grice’s maxims
In 1975, H. P.Grice published a seminal article entitled "The Co-operative
Principle" that created quite a stir on the linguistic scene and generated a large
number of linguistic publications that built on Grice’s postulates. Paul Grice
proposes that in ordinary conversation, speakers and hearers share a cooperative
principle. The basic assumption is that any discourse, whether written or spoken, is
a joint effort. Both the speaker and the addressee have to follow certain pragmatic,
syntactic, and semantic rules in order to communicate effectively. They have to cooperate.
The Cooperative Principle is an attempt to show how speaker’s meaning
arises from sentence meaning.
As phrased by Paul Grice, who introduced it, it states, "Make your
contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted
purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged." Though
phrased as a prescriptive command, the principle is intended as a description of
how people normally behave in conversation. Put more simply, people who obey
the cooperative principle in their language use will make sure that what they say in
a conversation furthers the purpose of that conversation. Obviously, the
requirements of different types of conversations will be different.
The cooperative principle can be divided into four maxims, called the
Gricean maxims,
The principle can be explained by four underlying rules or maxims
describing specific rational principles observed by people who obey the
cooperative principle; these principles enable effective communication. (David
Crystal calls them conversational maxims. They are also sometimes named
Grice’s or Gricean maxims.) They are the maxims of quality, quantity, relevance
and manner.
− Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true. – Speakers should be
truthful. They should not say what they think is false, or make statements for
which they have no evidence.
− Quantity: Give the right amount of information. – A contribution should be
as informative as is required for the conversation to proceed. It should be
neither too little, nor too much. (It is not clear how one can decide what
quantity of information satisfies the maxim in a given case.)
− Relevance: Be relevant. – Speakers’ contributions should relate clearly to
the purpose of the exchange.
− Manner: Be perspicuous [i.e. clear, easy to follow]. – Speakers’
contributions should be perspicuous: clear, orderly and brief, avoiding
obscurity and ambiguity.
Of these maxims, the most important is the Maxim of Relation: in listening
to someone, we assume that whatever that person is saying to us is somehow
relevant to the conversational situation. So, for example, in the following
interchange:
A: Mary lost a book today.
B: Well, I saw Jane carrying around a new book this afternoon.
Person A will infer from B’s utterance that Jane is somehow responsible for
the disappearance of Mary’s book, even though B did actually not say that Jane
was responsible: the Maxim of Relation gives us license to infer that B would not
have said what s/he did unless the information B provided was somehow relevant
to the statement A made. In this way, B’s statement licensed a conversational
implicature. Consider also the following:
A: Do you like wine?
B: Thanks.
If at a party, A stands before B and asks if B if s/he likes wine, B is allowed
to infer that A is offering B wine even though A did not literally make an offer of
wine. The Maxim of Relation licenses B to infer that A is offering wine since that
understanding would make A’s question most relevant to the context in which it
was said. In other words, understanding what someone is saying to us involves not
just understanding the literal meaning of their utterances, but also making
inferences about how that literal meaning is relevant to the current situation. This
means that we could infer two different messages from the same utterance
depending on how we interpret the situation. So, if someone says, A: You can close the door. we could interpret the statement as a not-too-polite request to close the door or as a statement about the condition of the door [= ‘the door can be closed’] depending on the context in which it is uttered: conversational implicature is sensitive to the context of the utterance.
The other maxims are also important. For example, consider the following
letter of recommendation:
Dear Sir or Madam:
Mr. Hardbottom faithfully turns his work in on time and actively
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