Introducing English Linguistics

Problems with the cooperative principle
Determining whether an individual has violated or adhered to a maxim
of the cooperative principle is largely a matter of interpretation. As a
result, different people will reach different conclusions about the same
utterance. In the example below, Floyd Landis is commenting on the
results of two drug tests he took following his winning the Tour de France
in 2006 that revealed elevated levels of testosterone: 
I have never taken any banned substance, including testosterone. I was
the strongest man in the Tour de France and that is why I am the cham-
pion.
Those who believe Landis’ claims of innocence will obviously not think
that he violated the maxim of quality. Those who do not believe him will
think he did violate this maxim, and the implicature that they will draw
is that he is a liar trying to protect his reputation.
In other situations, it is not clear whether one or more maxims have
been violated. In an utterance discussed earlier in this section, an inter-
viewee did not directly answer a question about whether he had done well
on a standardized test: he said nothing about his own performance but
instead commented on how well one of the other interviewees had done.
Because his answer was incomplete, he violated the maxim of quantity.
But by violating this maxim, he arguably made his contribution unclear
as well. Does this mean that he violated both the maxims of quantity and
manner simultaneously? Again, there is no way that this question can be
definitively answered, since how people interpret an utterance is often a
highly subjective and personal matter. 
The positing of four maxims of the cooperative principle raises another
question: why these four maxims and not more or fewer maxims? To
address the criticism inherent in this question, Sperber and Wilson (1995)
have proposed a general theory of relevance. This theory is grounded in
Grice’s notion of speaker intentions, but instead of expressing these inten-
tions through separate maxims, the theory is centered on the idea that
when people communicate, they try to determine the relevance of what is
said to them:
Intuitively, an input (a sight, a sound, an utterance, a memory) is rele-
vant to an individual when it connects with background information he
has available to yield conclusions that matter to him: say, by answering a
question he had in mind, improving his knowledge on a certain topic,
settling a doubt, confirming a suspicion, or correcting a mistaken
impression. 
(Wilson and Sperber 2006: 608)
Relevance, Wilson and Sperber (2006: 609) argue, is a scalar phenomenon,
with highly relevant utterances having higher “positive cognitive effects”
and less relevant utterances increasing “the processing effort expended.”
Thus, as they note, if a woman who is allergic to chicken calls the host of
a dinner party she is attending to inquire what will be served for dinner,
the reply We are serving chicken will be much more relevant than We are
The social context of English
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serving meat, since the first utterance provides her with a highly informa-
tive response to her question and also entails the second utterance.
This does not necessarily mean that all communication will be as highly
relevant as the first reply to the woman’s question. Instead, speakers strive
to achieve what Wilson and Sperber (2006: 612) characterize as “optimal
relevance.” For instance, if I ask you whether you enjoyed the dinner I just
cooked for you, and you reply It was fine, this response rather than I loved
it may be all you are willing to tell me. And I may infer from your response
that you did not like the dinner all that much – a correct inference
because had your response been more relevant, it would have been highly
impolite. Politeness, as the next section will demonstrate, overrides many
of the pragmatic principles discussed thus far.
In their highly influential cross-linguistic analysis of politeness conven-
tions in language, Brown and Levinson (1987: 60–1) argue that politeness
in language is centered around the notion of face – “the public self-image
that every member wants to claim for himself ” – and the efforts made by
interlocutors to “maintain each other’s face.” Polite usage of language
comes into play whenever a speaker has the potential to produce a face-