Лекции по теоретической грамматике английского языка для студентов

Lecture 17 
The Cooperative Principle. 
The Politeness Principle 
1.
Conversational implicature. 
2.
The Cooperative Principle and Grice’s maxims. 
3.
The Politeness Principle and Leech’s maxims. 
1. Conversational Implicature 
In a series of lectures at Harvard University in 1967, the English language 
philosopher H.P. (Paul) Grice outlined an approach to what he termed 
conversational implicature
– how hearers manage to work out the complete 
message when speakers mean more than they say. An example of what Grice 
meant by conversational implicature is the utterance: 
“Have you got any cash on you?” 
where the speaker really wants the hearer to understand the meaning: 
“Can you lend me some money? I don’t have much on me.” 
Consider the following: 
parent
 Did you do your homework? 
child
 I finished my essay. 
parent
 Well, you better do your algebra too. 
The parent inferred that the child had not done all her homework, even 
though she did not assert she didn’t. The parent inferred that if the child explicitly 
mentioned only one of her assignments, she had not done the other; that is, 
mentioning only the essay and failing to mention 
algebra implicates that she had not done her algebra. 
The 
conversational implicature
is a message that is not found in the plain 
sense of the sentence. The speaker implicates it. The hearer is able to infer (work 
out, read between the lines) this message in the utterance by appealing to the rules 
governing successful conversational interaction. Grice proposed that implicatures 

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like the second sentence can be calculated from the first, by understanding three 
things: 
−
The usual linguistic meaning of what is said. 
−
Contextual information (shared or general knowledge). 
−
The assumption that the speaker is obeying what Grice calls the cooperative 
principle.