appropriate amount of information, tell the truth, be relevant, and try to be as clear as they
can. In this case, the speaker conveys his intention, and at the same time the listener receives
it. Related to this, the speaker and the listener involved in the conversation have to speak
cooperatively and mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way.
Otherwise, it can lead to misinterpretation. Therefore, people should obey the principle to
enhance
Conversation makes use of the cooperative principle; speakers and listeners are guided
by considerations of quantity, quality, and so on, and the process of implicature which allows
them to figure out relationships between the said and the unsaid. Grices principles, therefore,
form a fundamental part of any understanding of conversation as a cooperative activity.
However, In real practice, people do not always follow all of the Grices maxims when they
have a conversation. Everyday conversations are far from ideal circumstances like what Grice
suggests. In a conversation, the speaker may do one of four things with regards to the
cooperative principle and the maxims. These are listed below.
1. The speaker may observe the maximsthis is the default assumption.
2. The speaker may opt out of a maxim by using a phrase that eliminates or mitigates the
effect of the maxims and signals this to the addresseethis phrase is called a hedge.
3. The speaker may flout a maxim, to the full knowledge of the addressee
flouting of it, it is hard to see how B could accrue prestige in his eyes from such an
exchange.
2. Differentiation
Davis (2005) uses the example of scalar implicature to show that Gricean theory can
overgenerate implicatures. He claims that The schema used to work out observed
implicatures can usually be used just as well to work out nonexistent implicatures.
No athletes smoke
Based on Gricean maxims, these sentences are flouting maxims of quantity. However,
Gricean implicature theory cannot differentiate the hearers interpretation by
producing such utterances.
3. Relevance
Sperber & Wilson (1986) argued that all of Grices maxims could be replaced by a
single principle of relevance that the speaker tries to be as relevant as possible in
the circumstances. They produced one of the most influential alternatives to Grices
theory. They developed a theory of relevance based on a number of assumptions
about communication:
1. Every utterance has a variety of linguistically possible interpretations, all
compatible with the decoded sentence meaning.
2. Not all these interpretations are equally accessible to the hearer (i.e. equally
likely to come to the hearers mind) on a given occasion.
3. Hearers are equipped with a single, very general criterion for evaluating
interpretations
: Mbak, kulo saget nyambut yatra nipun? (Sister, can I borrow your
money, please?)
Ngatinem
: E, dos pundi nggih. Anto (her son) dereng mbayar SPP. (Hmm, I
she needs herself to pay her sons tuition fee. Although this kind of conversation happened
most of the time in Javanese culture, they are relevant and effective in their context.
If we see another context, lets say business or politics, when people do not frankly or
directly stating something, Grices maxims will be always flouted. In a diplomatic way,
people are communicating each other effectively without providing some expected or
prescribed elements that should be followed.
President A: Hows your country GNP?
President B: No people in my country is starving
To conclude, Grices CP could be seen as a great contribution in suggesting an
effective principles. However, it would be better if this taxonomy or its theory could develop
as the pattern of human interaction/ conversation differs from time to time, from culture to
culture, from setting to settings.
References
Davis, W. 2005, Implicature, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2005
Edition),
Edward
N.
Zalta
(ed.),
retrieved
from:
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2005/entries/implicature/
Grice, H. 1975, Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics
3: Speech acts (pp. 4158) New York: Academic Press.
Keenan, E. O. 1974, The Universality of Conversational Postulates Studies in Linguistic
Variation, ed. R. W. Fasold & R. W. Shuy, Washington, D. C., Georgetown Univ.
Press, pp. 25568
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. 1986, Relevance: Communication and cognition. Blackwell,
Oxford and Harvard UP, Cambridge MA