This is a pragmatic concept introduced
by the philosopher Grice (1975). He formalized his observation that when we
talk, we try to be cooperative with one another. The major task of the
cooperative principle is to explain how speakers ‘make sense’ out of the listener
in spite of the ellipses that seem to characterize human communication. According
to Grice (1975) the cooperative principle requires you to “make your conversation
contribution such as is required, at the stage which by the accepted purpose or
direction of the talk exchange in which you are engage”.
Within this principle, he proposed four
maxims (or ‘super maxims’ as he termed them).
·
QUALITY:
Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current
purposes of
the exchange). Do not make your contribution more informative than
is required.
·
QUANTITY: “Try to make your contribution one
that is true.
(a) Do not say what you believe to be
false.
(b) Do not say that for which you lack
adequate evidence.
·
RELATION: Be relevant.
·
MANNER: Be perspicuous.
(a) avoid obscurity of expression
(b) Avoid ambiguity.
(c) Be brief (avoid unnecessary
prolixity).
(d) Be orderly.
Archer
& Grundy (2011) observes that there are guiding principles which govern cooperative
talk, which knowing these principles (maxims) enables an addressee to draw
inferences as to the implied meaning (implications) of utterances. Every
utterance, whether it abides by or violates (flouts) the maxims, has both
natural meaning (entailment) and non natural meaning (implicature). Flouting a
maxim is a particularly salient way of getting an addressee to draw an
inference and hence recover an implicature.
When an utterance has several linguistically possible interpretations, the best hypothesis for the hearer to choose is the one that best satisfies the Cooperative Principle and maxims. Sometimes, in order to explain why a maxim has been (genuinely or apparently) violated, the hearer has to assume that the speaker believes, and was trying to communicate, more than was explicitly said. Such implicitly communicated propositions, or implicatures, are widely seen as the main subject matter of pragmatics.
When an utterance has several linguistically possible interpretations, the best hypothesis for the hearer to choose is the one that best satisfies the Cooperative Principle and maxims. Sometimes, in order to explain why a maxim has been (genuinely or apparently) violated, the hearer has to assume that the speaker believes, and was trying to communicate, more than was explicitly said. Such implicitly communicated propositions, or implicatures, are widely seen as the main subject matter of pragmatics.
Most current pragmatic theories share
Grice’s view that inferential comprehension is governed by expectations about
the behaviour of speakers, but differ as to what these expectations are.
Neo-Griceans such as Atlas (2005), Gazdar (1979), Horn (2000, 2004, and 2005)
and Levinson (1983, 1987, 2000) stay relatively close to Grice’s maxims. For
instance, Levinson (2000) proposes the following principles, based on Grice’s
Quantity and Manner maxims (and given here in abridged form):
Q-Principle (Levinson
2000: 76)
Do not provide a statement that is
informationally weaker than your knowledge of the world allows.
I-Principle (Levinson
2000: 114)
Produce the minimal linguistic
information sufficient to achieve your communicational ends.
M-Principle (Levinson
2000: 136)
Indicate an abnormal,
nonstereotypical situation by using marked expressions that contrast with those
you would use to describe the corresponding normal, stereotypical situations.
Each principle has a corollary for
the audience (e.g. ‘Take it that the speaker made the strongest statement
consistent with what he knows’) which provides a heuristic for hearers to use
in identifying the speaker’s meaning.
For many philosophers and linguists,
an attraction of the neo-Gricean programme is its attempt to combine an
inferential account of communication with a view of language strongly
influenced by formal semantics and generative grammar. The aim is to solve
specifically linguistic problems by modelling pragmatics as closely as possible
on formal semantics, assigning interpretations to sentence-context pairs
without worrying too much about the psychological mechanisms involved. Gazdar
(1979: 49) gives a flavour of this approach.
Accordingly, neo-Griceans have tended
to focus on generalised
conversational implicatures, which are “normally (in the absence of special
circumstances)” carried by use of a certain form of words (Grice 1967/89: 37),
and are, therefore, codifiable to some degree. For example, the utterance in
(1a) would normally convey a generalised implicature of the form in (1b):[1]
1a. Some of my friends are
philosophers.
1b. Not all of my friends are
philosophers.
Levinson (2000) treats generalised
implicatures as assigned by default to all utterances of this type, and
contextually cancelled only in special circumstances. Particularised implicatures, by contrast, depend on “special
features of the context” (Grice 1967/1989: 37), and cannot be assigned by default.
Relevance theory (Sperber &
Wilson 1986/95; Carston 2002; Wilson & Sperber 2002, 2004), while still
based on Grice’s two foundational ideas, departs from his framework in two
important respects. First, while Grice was mainly concerned with the role of
pragmatic inference in implicit communication, relevance theorists have
consistently argued that the explicit side of communication is just as
inferential and worthy of pragmatic attention as the implicit side (Wilson
& Sperber 1981). This has implications not only for the nature of explicit
communication but also for semantics. As noted above, Grice and others (e.g. Searle and Lewis) who have contributed to the
development of an inferential approach to communication have tended to minimize
the gap between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning. They treat sentences as
encoding something as close as possible to full propositions, and explicit
communication as governed by a maxim or convention of truthfulness, so that the
inference from sentence meaning to speaker’s meaning is simply a matter of
assigning referents to referring expressions, and perhaps of deriving
implicatures. Relevance theorists have argued that relevance-oriented
inferential processes are efficient enough to allow for a much greater slack
between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning, with sentence meaning typically
being quite fragmentary and incomplete, and speaker’s explicit meaning going
well beyond the minimal proposition arrived at by disambiguation and reference
assignment.