Grice's Conversational Maxims

7 Key excerpts on "Grice's Conversational Maxims"

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  Introduction to Psycholinguistics

  Understanding Language Science

  • Matthew J. Traxler(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Grice starts with the idea that participants in a conversation try to cooperate with one another in order to expand the pool of shared knowledge (see also Clark, 1996; Glucksberg & Keysar, 1990; Wilkes-Gibbs & Clark, 1992). Engaging in this cooperative activity involves following other rules (maxims) as well. These include the maxims of quality, quantity, manner, and relation. The maxim of quality specifies that you should tell the truth; your utterances should be literally true. We don’t like it when people lie to us. The maxim of quantity specifies that your utterances should provide new information. So you should not simply repeat information that is already in common ground (knowledge that is shared, and known to be shared, between the participants in the conversation). We get annoyed when we have to listen to the same story over and over again, or when someone repeats themselves unnecessarily, or belabors a point long after we have already figured out the thrust of their argument, or tries our patience by sticking to a settled topic, or doesn’t tell us anything that we don’t already know. The maxim of manner specifies that your utterances should be clear and unambiguous. You should convey information as plainly and directly as possible, so that your utterance does not have multiple possible interpretations. The maxim of relation specifies that your utterance should contribute to or continue the current topic of discussion, unless you explicitly introduce a new topic. So, if we are talking about baseball, my next utterance should be on the topic of baseball unless I say something like, Enough baseball, let’s talk about me now. Indirect requests such as Can you get me a beer? can violate the maxim of quantity. It is obvious from my appearance that I am physically capable of retrieving beer, so uttering that question does not provide me with an obvious means of moving the conversation forward if it is interpreted as a literal request for information

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  Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

  • David Hornsby(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Teach Yourself

    (Publisher)

  …[We] need first to get clear on the character of Grice’s maxims. They are not sociological generalizations about speech, nor are they moral prescriptions or proscriptions on what to say or communicate. Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit.

  (Bach 2006: 5)

  It is important to understand what the principle and its maxims are and, equally importantly, what they are not. They are not rules, like grammatical rules: it is possible to violate them – sometimes deliberately and ostentatiously so – and our utterance (the term employed to signify a spoken contribution in context) will still be understood. Nor are they social imperatives of the ‘don’t forget to say please and thank you’ kind, though they are a kind of social convention which we unconsciously acquire as we learn to use language.

  What the principle and maxims amount to is a very robust set of assumptions that participants make about the conversation in which they are engaged, which are often maintained even in the face of evidence that co-operation has broken down. So even where, for example, a speaker’s contribution to an interaction appears irrelevant, a hearer will generally assume that it was intended as relevant, and strive to find an interpretation which fits the purposes of the current exchange. Similarly, it hardly needs saying that speakers do not always speak the truth as the maxim of quality requires, but conversation nonetheless proceeds on the assumption that contributions are truthful, unless and until that assumption becomes untenable (see Case study below).

  Key idea: The co-operative principle

  According to Grice’s co-operative principle, conversation can only proceed while participants assume each other to be co-operating. This assumption is so strong that they will endeavour to interpret each other’s contributions as co-operative, even when superficially they appear not to be.

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  Meaning in Interaction

  An Introduction to Pragmatics

  • Jenny A. Thomas(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Conversational Maxims help us establish what that implicature might be.

  3.5 The four conversational maxims

  In 'Logic and conversation' Grice proposed four maxims, the maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner, which were formulated as follows:

  3.5.1 Observing the maxims

  The least interesting case is when a speaker observes all the maxims as in the following example:

  Example 10

  Husband: Where are the car keys? Wife: They're on the table in the hall.

  The wife has answered clearly (Manner) truthfully (Quality), has given just the right amount of information (Quantity) and has directly addressed her husband's goal in asking the question (Relation), She has said precisely what she meant, no more and no less, and has generated no implicature (i.e. there is no distinction to be made here between what she says and what she means, there is no additional level of meaning).

  3.5.2 Non-observance of the maxims

  Grice was well aware, however, that there are very many occasions when people fail to observe the maxims. There are five ways of failing to observe a maxim:

  Flouting a maximViolating a maximInfringing a maximOpting out of a maximSuspending a maxim

  People may fail to observe a maxim because, for example, they are incapable of speaking clearly, or because they deliberately choose to lie. I shall discuss each of these possibilities in order, but the most important category by far, the one which generates an implicature, is the first, and I shall devote an entire section to flouting.

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  Introduction to Pragmatics

  • Betty J. Birner(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  do make their utterances appropriate in context. To do otherwise would be, in a word, uncooperative. Grice’s fundamental insight was that conversation can work only because both people are trying to be cooperative – trying to make their contribution appropriate to the conversation at hand. Even when one might assume the participants are in fact being utterly uncooperative – say, in the course of a bitter argument, in which neither wants the other to gain any ground – they are in fact being conversationally cooperative: They stick to the topic (or at least relevant side topics – presenting other grievances, perhaps, but not abruptly mentioning irrelevant sports scores), they say interpretable things in a reasonably concise way, and they try to complete their thoughts while not giving distracting or irrelevant details. A truly uncooperative interlocutor would be almost impossible to have a successful argument with; such an individual would comment irrelevantly on the weather, or fail to respond at all, perhaps choosing to read the newspaper instead. In short, whether the conversation is a friendly or hostile one, it is only because the participants are trying to be cooperative that the conversation can proceed. Moreover, as we will see below, it is only because each assumes that the other is being cooperative that they stand a chance of being able to accurately interpret each other’s comments.

  The CP consists of four “maxims,” each of which covers one aspect of linguistic interaction and describes what is expected of a cooperative speaker with respect to that maxim. The maxims, with rough paraphrases of their content, are:

  1.  The Maxim of Quantity: Say enough, but don’t say too much.

  2.  The Maxim of Quality: Say only what you have reason to believe is true.

  3.  The Maxim of Relation: Say only what is relevant.

  4.  The Maxim of Manner: Be brief, clear, and unambiguous.

  Each of these maxims is discussed in detail in the sections to follow, but this brief list will suffice to introduce the role that they play in human language.

  The general line of reasoning the hearer undergoes is to implicitly ask, “What intention on the part of the speaker would allow this to count as a cooperative utterance?” The answer to that question suggests to the hearer what the speaker’s probable intention was. There are four ways in which the speaker can behave with respect to the CP; the speaker can:

  • observe the maxims,
  • violate a maxim,
  • flout a maxim, or
  • opt out of the maxims.

  To observe a maxim is to straightforwardly obey it – that is, to in fact say the right amount, to say only what you have evidence for, to be relevant, or to be brief, clear, and unambiguous (depending on the maxim in question). To violate a maxim is to fail to observe it, but to do so inconspicuously, with the assumption that your hearer won’t realize that the maxim is being violated. A straightforward example of this is a lie: The speaker makes an utterance while knowing it to be false (that is, a violation of Quality), and assumes that the hearer won’t know the difference. Violations of maxims are generally intended to mislead. To flout a maxim is also to violate it – but in this case the violation is so intentionally blatant that the hearer is expected to be aware of the violation. If, after taking an exam, I tell a friend that exam was a breeze , I clearly don’t expect my friend to believe I intended my utterance to be taken as literal truth, since an exam and a (literal) breeze are two completely distinct things. Here, the hearer’s line of reasoning is something like, “The speaker said something that blatantly violates the maxim of Quality; nonetheless, I must assume that they are trying to be cooperative. What meaning might they intend that would constitute cooperative behavior in this context?” In the case of that exam was a breeze , the assumption of overall cooperativity might lead the hearer to appeal to the maxim of Relation and realize that the speaker’s intention was to attribute a relevant property of breezes (e.g., ease, pleasantness) to the exam. (Notice, however, that in many cases, including this one, the phrase has become idiomatic and the implicature no longer needs to be “worked out” each time the phrase is used.) Finally, to opt out

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  Pragmatics: The Basics

  • Billy Clark(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Despite naming it a ‘theory’, Grice saw his proposal as a tentative first step towards a more fully developed account. His central insight was recognised as extremely important and there was lots of discussion of how to apply it. At the same time, there was discussion of a range of gaps and other issues. This included discussion of the details of the maxims Grice proposed and the question of whether they were all needed. Some maxims seem not to play much of a role in accounting for how we communicate and understand each other. Others seem to overlap in that it seems to be possible to use more than one of them to play the same role in explanations. The approaches discussed here arose partly from discussion of this.

  Quantity and Relation: ‘Overlapping’ Maxims?

  In the previous chapter, I suggested that we could explain the interpretation of Bella’s response in the following exchanges with reference to the first maxim of quantity, given that what Bella says each time seems not to be ‘as informative as is required’:

  • (1) Adam:   What is the exam for this module like?
  •   Bella:   Like an exam.
  • (2) Adam:   How you getting on with your pragmatics essay?
  •   Bella:   It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it? Look at that sky!

  On Grice’s account, since what is said is not informative enough, Adam will infer implicatures which do provide enough information.

  We could equally have offered explanations for each of these which refer to the maxim of relation since they do not say something relevant (as mentioned, of course, this depends on having the fuller definition of ‘relevant’ which Grice knew was missing). We also looked at example (3), where the speaker says something which provides too much information. This could also be explained as a case where what is said is not relevant, since the hearer already knows it:

  • (3) Adam:What is the exam for this module like?
  •   Bella:It starts with all the students gathering on campus outside the exam room. Then an invigilator opens the door and invites everybody into the room…

  Noticing overlaps like this led some theorists to wonder whether Grice might have suggested more maxims than we really need.

  Quality and Manner: Maxims Which Don’t Do Very Much

  On the other hand, some maxims do not seem to be referred to very often. The most obvious examples are the maxims of quality and of manner.

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  Pragmatics and its Applications to TESOL and SLA

  • Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter (5) . Others have argued that the number of maxims should be reduced. We will review these approaches later.

  Neo- and Post-Gricean Theories of Pragmatics

  A classification of pragmatic theories one is likely to encounter distinguishes between neo-Gricean and Post-Gricean theories. Neo-Gricean approaches can be characterized as using and adapting, often critically and with significant revisions, as we have seen earlier, Grice’s fundamental insights. Post-Gricean pragmatics consists mostly of RT, which claims to have gone beyond Grice’s insights and to have essentially discarded them (Clark, 2013, pp. 83–84). Other authors postulate other principles or the replacement of cooperation by other principles.

  Two prominent neo-Gricean approaches take a different direction from the proposal to expand the CP seen earlier. Both Larry Horn and Stephen Levinson have argued that the CP should be replaced by fewer maxims. Horn (1984) argues that the CP should be replaced by two principles:

  1. Q principle: Make your contribution sufficient; say as much as you can.
  2. R principle: Make your contribution necessary; say no more than you must.

  The names are meant to recall Grice’s quantity and relevance, but clearly the principles are inspired by the principle of least effort and maximum differentiation familiar in historical linguistics. Speakers tend to minimize effort, which leads to reduction of sounds in the direction of ease of pronunciation; however, this is counterbalanced by the desire to make processing easier as well, and thus the need to differentiate between excessive similarity. On the principle of least effort, see Zipf (1949); on maximum differentiation, Martinet (1955).

  Levinson argues for three maxims: Q, I, and M, explicitly modeled after Grice’s and Horn’s maxims.

  1. Q principle: Make the strongest statement consistent with what you know (Levinson, 2000, p. 76).
  2. I principle: “Say as little as necessary” (p. 114).

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  Principles of Pragmatics

  • Geoffrey N. Leech(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Grice himself sees this maxim as in some sense less important than (eg) the Maxim of Quality, and as differing from the others in ‘relating not … to what is said but, rather, to how what is said is to be said’ (1975:46). This might be taken as a clue that the Maxim of Manner belongs not to the CP – and therefore not to the Interpersonal Rhetoric at all – but to the rhetoric of text. In fact, in the outline of the Textual Rhetoric given in 3.3.3, I introduced the Clarity Principle as one of its constituent principles. And the difference between ‘being perspicuous’ and ‘being clear’ is, to say the least, not perspicuous. None the less, I believe that Grice was right to recognize the Maxim of Manner as one of the elements of his CP, and that the charge to ‘be clear’ is placed on language users as part of the Interpersonal Rhetoric, as well as of the Textual Rhetoric. There are two kinds of clarity. One kind consists in making unambiguous use of the syntax and phonology of the language in order to construct a clear text. Another type of clarity consists in framing a clear message, ie a message which is perspicuous or intelligible in the sense of conveying the intended illocutionary goal to the addressee. What this implies is that exchanges such as [32]–[36] should be rather rare – as indeed, they probably are, outside joke books. Perspicuity in this sense is obviously hand in glove with relevance; both the Maxim of Manner and the Maxim of Relation will favour the most direct communication of one’s illocutionary point, and both, for that reason, will militate against the obliquity of the Hinting Strategy

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