Лекции по теоретической грамматике английского языка для студентов

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. 

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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