GRICE’S COOPERATIVE
PRINCIPLE
AND CONVERSATIONAL
IMPLICATURE
1
THE PRINCIPLE ITSELF
• In his William James Lectures at Harvard University in 1967,
H. Paul Grice posited a general set of rules contributors to
ordinary conversation were generally expected to follow. He
named it the Cooperative Principle (CP), and formulated it
as follows:
• Make your conversational contribution such as is required,
at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or
direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged
(Grice, 1989: 26).
2
CP :IS AN IDEALISTIC
REPRESENTATION?
• At first glance, the Cooperative Principle may appear an
idealistic representation of actual human communication.
After all, as Grice himself has learned from his detractors,
many believe ‘‘. . . even in the talk-exchanges of civilized
people browbeating disputation and conversational sharp
practices are far too common to be offenses against the
fundamental dictates of conversational practice.’’ Further,
even if one discounts the tone of an exchange, ‘‘much of our
talk exchange is too haphazard to be directed toward an end
cooperative or otherwise’’ (Grice, 1989: 369).
3
GRICE’S INTENTION
• Grice has never intended his use of the word
‘cooperation’ to indicate an ideal view of
communication. Rather, Grice was trying to
describe how it happens that – despite the
haphazard or even agonistic nature of much
ordinary human communication – most discourse
participants are quite capable of making
themselves understood and capable of
understanding most others in the course of their
daily business.
4
WHAT COUNTS AS COOPERATION?
• Grice invites us to consider the following, quite unextraordinary
exchange:
• A: I am out of petrol.
• B: There is a garage round the corner (Grice, 1989: 32).
• Assuming A immediately proceeds to the garage, secures the petrol, and
refills his car, we may describe B’s contribution as having been
successful. By what rational process of thought was A so quickly able to
come to the conclusion that the garage to which B refers would fulfill his
need for petrol? Why did B’s utterance work? Grice’s answer: because A
and B adhere to the Cooperative Principle of Discourse. It is not hard to
imagine that two friends sharing a ride would want to help each other
through a minor crisis; thus, ‘cooperation’ in this scenario seems quite
apt.
5
ANOTHER WAY OF COOPERATION
• But imagine the exchange went this way instead:
• A: I am out of petrol.
• B: (sarcastically) How nice that you pay such close attention to important
details.
• In this second scenario, not only does B refuse to assist A in
solving the problem, he uses the occasion to add to A’s
conundrum an assault upon his character. Assuming A feels the
sting; again B’s contribution has been successful. So how and
why in this case has B’s contribution worked? How can such a
sour response as B’s callous retort be considered ‘cooperative’?
• Again, Grice’s Cooperative Principle proves a useful answer.
The explanation requires closer inspection of the strictness
with which Grice uses the term.
6
GRICE’S LIMIT OF CP APPLICATION
• Grice finds that most talk exchanges do follow the
CP because most talk exchanges do, in fact, exhibit
the cooperative characteristics he outlines:
• Our talk exchanges . . are characteristically, to
some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and
each participant recognizes in them, to some
extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or
at least a mutually accepted direction (Grice,
1989: 26).
7
Grice’s Types of Meanings
What is meant
What is said
What is
implicated
Conventionally
Nonconventionally
Conversationally
Generally
Particularly
Nonconversationally
8
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
• According to Grice, utterance interpretation is not a matter of decoding
messages, but rather involves
(1) taking the meaning of the sentences together with contextual information,
(2) using inference rules
(3) working out what the speaker means on the basis of the assumption that
the utterance conforms to the maxims. The main advantage of this
approach from Grice’s point of view is that it provides a pragmatic
explanation for a wide range of phenomena, especially for conversational
implicauture is--- a kind of extra meaning that is not literally contained in
the utterance.
An implicature is a piece of information that is conveyed indirectly by an
utterance. It is neither a part nor a necessary consequence of the utterance.
9
GRICE’S MAXIMS
• Grice identified the Cooperative Principle as a ‘super principle’ or a
‘supreme principle’ (1989: 368f) that he generalized from four
conversational ‘maxims’ he claimed discourse participants ordinarily follow.
Grice(1989: 28) identifies the maxims as:
1. The Maxim of Quality
• 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 (Say what you
believe to be true)
• 2. The Maxim of Quantity
• A. make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current
purpose of the exchange)
• B. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required
10
3- The Maxim of Relation
• Be relevant
4-The Maxim of Manner
• A. Be perspicuous:.
• B. Avoid obscurity of expression.
• C. Avoid ambiguity.
• D. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
• F. Be orderly
11
Clear fulfillment of these maxims may be demonstrated in the
following exchange:
• Husband: Where are the car keys?
• Wife: They ‘re on the table in the hall.
The wife has answered clearly (manner) and 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.
• But Grice knew that people do not always follow these maxims
as they communicate ;”What dull business conversation
analysis would be if they did!” Rather, interlocutors can fail to
fulfill the maxims in a variety of ways, some mundane, some
inadvertent, but others lead to what most consider the most
powerful aspect of Grice’s CP: conversational ‘implicature.’
12
Quality implicature
-John has two PhDs.
+<I believe John has two PhDs,and have adequate evidence that he has.
Quantity Implicature
-Nigel has fourteen children.
+<Nigel has no more than fourteen children.
Relation Implicature
-A: Can you tell me the time?
-B: Well, the milkman has come.
+>The time now is after the time the milkman arrived.
Manner Implicature
-A: How do I get into your apartment?
-B: Walk up to the front door, turn the door handle clockwise as far as it will go, and then pull gently
towards you.
+>Pay particular attention and care to each step of the instructions I’ve given you.
- John is a tiger.
- His wife has wooden ears.
13
FAILURE OF MAXIMS AND IMPLICATURES
• Grice describes four ways in which maxims may go
unfulfilled in ordinary conversation.
1-infringing
2-Opting out
3-suspending
4-flouting
• The first three ways are fairly straight forward. One might
violate or infringe a maxim. This infringement is often done
with the intention of misleading; for example, one might
say, ‘Patricia was with a man last night’ as a way of making
Patricia’s routine dinner out with her husband seem
clandestine.
14
Maxim infringement
• Maxim infringement occurs when a Speaker fails to observe the maxim, although s/he has no
intention of generating an implicature and no intention of deceiving. Generally infringing
stems from imperfect linguistic performance (in the case of a young child or a foreigner) or
from impaired linguistic performance brought about by nervousness, drunkenness, excitement,
disability.
• –Rachel: Yeah, and also we need more umm, drinks. Hold on a second. (Gets up but stumbles
a little bit.) Whup, okay. (She makes it to the phone and picks it up, without dialing.) Hello!
Vegas? Yeah, we would like some more cola, and y’know what else? We would like some more
pizza. Hello? Ohh, I forgot to dial!
• –(They both start laughing. There’s a knock on the door.)
• –Ross: That must be our cola and piza! (Gets up to answer it.)
• –Joey: Hey!
• –Ross: Ohh, it’s Joey! I love Joey! (Hugs him.)
• –Rachel: Ohh, I love Joey! Joey lives with a duck! (Goes and hugs Joey.)
• –Joey: Hi!
• –Rachel: Hey!
• –Joey: Look-look-look you guys, I need some help! Okay? Someone is going to have to
convince my hand twin to cooperate!
• –Ross: I’ll do it. Hey, whatever you need me to do, I’m your man. (He starts to sit down on the
bed. There’s one problem though, he’s about two feet to the left of it. Needless to say, he misses
and falls down.) (Looking up at Joey.) Whoa-oh-whoa! Are you, are you okay?
15
Opting out of a maxim
• •A Speaker opts out of observing a maxim whenever
s/he indicates unwillingness to cooperate in the way
the maxim requires.
• •This happens when a suspect exerts his right to
remain silent or when a witness chooses not to impart
information that may prove detrimental to the
defendant.
• Detective: Has the defendant ever told you she hated
her father and wanted him dead?
• Shrink: Such information is confidential and it would
be unethical to share it with you.
16
Suspending a maxim
• Under certain circumstances, as part of certain events ,there is no expectation
on the part of any participant that one or several maxims should be observed
(and non-fulfillment does not generate any implicatures). Such cases include:
• 1) Suspending the Quality Maxim in case of funeral orations and obituaries,
when the description of the deceased needs to be praiseworthy and exclude
any potentially unfavourable aspects of their life or personality.
• 2) Poetry suspends the Manner Maxim since it does not aim for conciseness,
clarity and lack of ambiguity.
• 3) In the case of speedy communication via telegrams, e-mails, notes, the
Quantity Maxim is suspended because such means are functional owing to
their very brevity.
• 4) Jokes are not only conventionally untrue, ambiguously and seemingly
incoherent, but are expected to exploit ambiguity, polysemy and vagueness
of meaning, which entails, among other things, suspension of the Maxims of
Quality, Quantity and Manner.
17
FLOUTING OF THE MAXIMS
• Without cooperation, human interaction would be
far more difficult and counterproductive.
Therefore, the Cooperative Principle and the
Gricean Maxims are not specific to conversation
but to interaction as a whole. For example, it would
not make sense to reply to a question about the
weather with an answer about groceries because it
would flout the Maxim of Relation. Likewise,
responding to a request for some milk with an
entire gallon instead of a glass would flout the
Maxim of Quantity.
18
A:
I hear you went to the theatre last night; what play did
you see?
B:
Well, I watched a number of people stand on the stage
in Elizabethan costumes uttering series of sentences which
corresponded closely with the script of Twelfth Night.
Here, B’s verbose answer, although it doesn’t say
anything more than “I saw a performance of
Twelfth Night,” invites A to infer that the
performers were doing a miserably bad job of
acting.
19
• However, it is possible to flout a maxim intentionally or
unconsciously and thereby convey a different meaning than
what is literally spoken. Many times in conversation, this
flouting is manipulated by a speaker to produce a negative
pragmatic effect, as with sarcasm or irony. One can flout
the Maxim of Quality to tell a clumsy friend who has just
taken a bad fall that her nimble gracefulness is impressive
and obviously intend to mean the complete opposite. The
Gricean Maxims are therefore often purposefully flouted by
comedians and writers, who may hide the complete truth
and manipulate their words for the effect of the story and
the sake of the reader’s experience.
20
A: What are you baking?
B: Be i are tee aitch dee ay wye see ay kay ee.
By answering obscurely, B conveys to A the
implicature that the information is to be kept secret
from the young child who is in the room with them.
Flouting the maxim of manner is clear.
21
PROPERTIES OF CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
•
Conversational implicatures have the following characteristics:
1- They are context dependent:
an expression with a single meaning (i.e., expressing the same proposition) can
give rise to different conversational implicatures in different contexts.
A: Have you cleaned the table and washed the dishes.
B: I’ve cleaned the table
2- They are cancelable:
•
… a putative conversational implicature that p is explicitly cancelable if, to the
form of words the utterance of which putatively implicates that p, it is
admissible to add but not p, or I do not mean to imply that p, and it is
contextually cancelable if one can find situations in which the utterance of the
form of words would simply not carry the implicature. (Grice,1989: 44.)
A :Did you attend the seminar and the following presentation.
B:I attended the seminar.
C: I attended the seminar and really enjoyed the presentation.
-The American and the Russians tested an atom bomb in 1962.
~+> The American and the Russians tested an atom bomb in 1962 together, not one
each.
22
3- They are non-detachable:
• The same propositional content in the same context will always give rise to the
same conversational implicature, in whatever form it is expressed. The implicature
is tied to the meaning ,not to form.
A -Jazzy didn’t manage to walk as far as the crossroads.
B- Jazzy attempted to walk as far as the crossroads.
C- Jazzy didn’t walk as far as the crossroads.
A==B , A==C , B=/=C
-The film almost/nearly came close to winning an Oscar.
- +>The film didn’t quite win an Oscar.
4- They are calculable:
• A conversational implicature must be calculable ,using state able general principles
on the basis of conventional meaning together with contextual information.
Implicatures can transparently derived from the cooperative principle and its
maxims
-If a couple decided between them that if one says:
‘I’m leaving’,
it automatically means that both should leave.
23
5- They are re-inforceable
A conversational implicature can be made explicit without producing too much of a sense
of redundancy.
- The soup is warm.
- +> The soup is not hot.
- The soup is warm , but not hot.
6- They are non-conventional
A conversational implicature ,though dependent on the saying of what is coded , are noncoded in nature. They rely on the saying of what is said but they are not part of what is
said.
- I’m leaving.
- +>we together leave because we earlier have agreed on this.
7- They are universal
Huang (2007:34f) mentions that :
- Some young people like pop music.
- +> Not all young people like pop music.
Can be found in English , Arabic , Catalan, Chinese, Modern Greek, Kashmiri, Malagasy , etc.
24
CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATURES
• This sixth property is what Grice considers crucial for distinguishing between conversational
and conventional implicatures. Conventional implicatures are generated by the meaning of
certain particles like ‘but’ ,’even’ , ‘yet’, or ‘therefore.’ They convey an idea of contrast , not
completion , result , but these ideas don’t affect the proposition expressed by the utterance.
Consider the difference between (1) and (2):
• He is an Englishman, therefore he is brave.
• He is an Englishman, and he is brave.
• His being brave follows from his being English.
• John lives in London and Mary lives in Oxford.
• John lives in London but Mary lives in Oxford
• According to Grice, a speaker has said the same with (1) as with (2). The difference is that with
(1) he implicates (3). This is a conventional implicature. It is the conventional meaning of
‘therefore,’ and not maxims of cooperation, that carry us beyond what is said.
• Grice's concept of conventional implicatures is the most controversial part of his theory of
conversation for many followers like Sperber & Wilson (1986), for several reasons. According
to some, its application to particular examples runs against common intuitions. By using the
word ‘therefore’ is the speaker not saying that there is some causal connection between being
brave and being English?
25
TYPES OF CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
• Among conversational implicatures, Grice distinguished between ‘particularized’
and ‘generalized.’
• The former are the implicatures that are generated by saying something in virtue of
some particular features of the context, “cases in which there is no room for the
idea that an implicature of this sort is normally carried by saying that p.” (Grice
,1989: 37).The above example of conversational implicature is, then, a case of
particularized conversational implicature.
• A generalized conversational implicature occurs where “the use of a certain forms
of words in an utterance would normally (in the absence of special circumstances)
carry such-and-such an implicature or type of implicature” (Ibid.). Grice's first
example is a sentence of the form “X is meeting a woman this evening.” Anyone
who utters this sentence, in absence of special circumstances, would be taken to
implicate that the woman in question was someone other than X's “wife, mother,
sister, or perhaps even close platonic friend” (Ibid.) Being an implicature, it could be
cancelled, either implicitly, in appropriate circumstances, or explicitly, adding some
clause that implies its denial.
• -Most of John’s friends are from his neighbourhood .
26
• Also , conversational implicatures can be scalar
and non-scalar. They are scalar as in using ‘some’
,,compared with <all, most, many , some , few >:
• I’m studying linguistics and I‘ve completed some
of the required courses.
27
CP CRITICISM:TANNEN’S CLAIMS
• Tannen (1986:34-45) claims that Grice’s maxims of
cooperative discourse can’t apply to ‘‘real
conversations’’ because in conversation ‘‘we wouldn’t
want to simply blurt out what we mean, because
we’re judging the needs for involvement and
independence’’.
• Tannen assumes that Grice’s maxims are
prescriptions that conversations must follow strictly in
order to be considered cooperative.
28
CAMERON’S CLAIMS
• Cameron demonstrates a reductive view of Grice’s
use of the term ‘cooperation’ when she describes
Grice’s CP as an ‘inflexible’ and ‘unproductive’
apparatus that provides yet another way for both
‘chauvinists and feminists’ to believe that ‘whereas
men compete in competition, women use cooperative strategies’ (1985: 40f).
29
COOPER’S OPINION
• Cooper (1982), interested in applying Grice to
theories of written composition, claims that Grice
advocates cooperation because what enables
conversation to proceed is an underlying
assumption that we as conversants have purposes
for conversing and that we recognize that these
purposes are more likely to be fulfilled if we
cooperate (p. 112).
30
GRICE’S OPINION
Grice himself acknowledged the difficulty some
have had interpreting his use of ‘cooperation.’ As a
final chapter to his 1989 book, Grice wrote a
‘Retrospective Epilogue’ in which he considered
criticism of his theories had engendered. It has
already been related that here Grice acknowledged
that his theory suffers from a perceived naïvete´.
31
To combat the criticism, Grice adds useful information about
what counts as cooperative in discourse. First, he reminds
readers of the sort of utterances he seeks to elucidate:
voluntary talk exchanges that require some form of
‘‘collaboration in achieving exchange of information or the
institution of decisions.’’ And, he points out that within
exchanges intended to produce information or determine
decisions, cooperation ‘‘may coexist with a high degree of
reserve, hostility, and chicanery and with a high degree of
diversity in the motivations underlying quite meager common
objectives’’ (Grice, 1989: 369).
32
• In the maxims, Grice believes he has found universal
conventions that all people may regularly follow in
their meaning-making talk exchanges. In order for
such a set of conventions to function, a certain degree
of at least tacit assent to those conventions is
necessary. Thus, the term ‘cooperation’ is quite apt.
The crucial subtlety of Grice’s theory is this:
interlocutors do not necessarily cooperate with each
other; they cooperate with a set of conventions that
allows each interlocutor to produce approximate
enough meanings for communication to work.
33
GRICE’S CLARIFICATION
• The aim for Gricean conversation analysis – and
thus the CP and the maxims – is not to advocate
benevolent cooperation, but to prove the
rationality of conversation. ‘‘. . . observance [of the
maxims] promotes and their violation [except in the
case of implicature] dispromotes conversational
rationality’’ (Grice, 1989: 370).
34
COPERATIVE:INTERLOCUTORS OR THEIR
CONTRIBUTION!
• Although many have claimed Grice’s writing on the CP is
ambiguous and is on occasion inconsistent with terminology,
this should not be said of Grice’s measured use of the term
‘cooperation.’ Precise readings of Grice’s writing on
cooperation demonstrate that he rarely, if ever, describes
interlocutors as being cooperative. Rather, he claims that
interlocutors’ contributions to conversation are cooperative.
The contributions are uttered in cooperation with a set of
conventions for producing meaning. In this sense, we might
think of a pair of interlocutors as each operating according to
the dictates of a set of conventions (the maxims) and thus they
are ‘cooperators’: two operators of discourse operating at
once.
35
COMMUNICATION IS HAPHAZARD
• The second major critique of the Cooperative
Principle has been a topic of spirited discussion
among linguistic philosophers since Grice first
proposed it. Grice himself identifies the problem as
resulting from the thought that communication is
simply too ‘‘haphazard’’ to be described accurately
as having a cooperative end. Some forms of
communication are not appropriately described by
the CP.
36
GRICE’SUGGESTIONS
• Grice suggests the problem is two-fold:
First, he agrees with critics that the maxims appear less
‘‘coordinate’’ than he would prefer. The maxim of quality
appears in some ways more definitive of information than
the other maxims. And, the maxims are not independent
enough: relevance has been often regarded as containing
the essence of the other maxims.
Second, Grice’s selection of cooperation as the ‘‘supreme
Conversational Principle’’ underpinning the rationalizing
operations of implicature remains, to say the least, not
generally accepted (1989: 371).
37
• Though in his final work he admitted some
misgivings and offered minor refinements of his
maxims of cooperative discourse, Grice, up until his
death in 1988, defended his selection of the
Cooperative Principle as the ‘supreme principle.’
38
NEO-GRICEAN PRAGMATICS
• Grice’s influence is most apparent in a branch of
linguistic study that has become known among
some as Neo-Gricean pragmatics. Scholars in this
field, like Horn(1989) and Levinson (1991) have
greatly revised Grice’s maxims of cooperative
discourse in a variety of interesting ways, but they
have maintained the basic direction of Grice’s work,
especially in regard to the concept of
conversational implicature.
39
THE RELEVANCE THEORY
• Sperber & Wilson (1986) produced one of the most influential alternatives
to Grice’s 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 hearer’s mind) on a given occasion.
• 3. Hearers are equipped with a single, very general criterion for
evaluating interpretations as they occur to them, and accepting or
rejecting them as hypotheses about the speaker’s meaning.
• 4. This criterion is powerful enough to exclude all but at most a single
interpretation (or a few closely similar interpretations), so that the hearer
is entitled to assume that the first hypothesis that satisfies it (if any) is the
only plausible one .
40
• Sperber and Wilson argued that all of Grice’s maxims could
be replaced by a single principle of relevance that the
speaker tries to be as relevant as possible in the
circumstances (1986). Davis (2005) argues that Sperber and
Wilson’s theory suffers from some of the same problems
as Grice’s, including:
• overgeneralization of implicatures
• a clash with the principle of style
• a clash with the principle of politeness
41
How to analyze a text
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The selected text is The Creak, a short play by Yousif Al-Ani, translated
by Dr.Mohammed Darweesh (Mamoon House,2010),pp.23-41. The
procedure adopted in analyzing the text is the following:
Numerating the starting of each line. The total number is 539 lines.
The text will be examined from a conversationally-organized
orientation , in the sense that a full conversation will be regarded as
the functional context.
Identifying the existent implicatures.
Classifying implicatures into conventional or conversational (scalar or
non-scalar).
The selected approach is Grice ‘s classification into conversational vs
conventional implicatures.
Reference will be shed on their maxims.
42
1-He: Good morning life, good morning world…(Turns to the door) may
you last long ,creak ,for as long as you are there, I am here! Go on with
your music,for you are the sign of my life and existence.
• +> He expresses his loneliness to the extent he regards the door creaky
sound a lovely piece of music.
• A conversational implicature where Flouting the maxim of quality is so
clear by using hedges like ‘as far as ‘, and the manner maxim in using the
modal ‘may’.
2- He: this is enough, it suffices to remind the muscles of life and work
• +> He regards the creak of the door as the ultimate sign of action and
movement in the sense that his life is such a quiet one. A conversational
implicature of the maxim of manner is maintained by using ‘enough’ and
‘suffice’.
43
3-He: impossible …you…impossible!!
She: Let me at least say hello before you shout. It reminds me of your
voice when you used to rage and scream.
• +> He saw her after a long period of time. Both are friends or relatives
that she still had some memories about his reaction. A conversational
implicatures of the maxim of relation. This implicatures is of two sides; in
the first line ,it is flouted by using ‘impossible’ as scalar implicature .In the
second line ,this conversational implicatures is followed without any form
of violation simply by using ‘at least’, which in turn stopped the possibility
of another scalar implicatures.
4-She: My house is in a densely populated area.
He: I do not …
• +> She lives in such a popular area or in a city, or many people always visit
her, in comparison of his. A conversational implicature where flouting of
the maxim of quantity is clear ,since more than one alternative is
possible. He opts out this maxim since he does not complete his
statement.
44
5-She :I wanted to depend on myself. I am still able to be of value to people and
the world, and be delighted by their happiness. I do not want to be a small part of
a whole.
He: You still philosophize as usual.
• +>She has the ability to help other people and she is willingly eager to do that A
conversational implicatures that she is still productive and useful despite being in
the sixties. She still has many ambitions to be done , which are regarded as
somehow difficult therefore he described the situation as a sort of philosophy.
Flouting of the maxim of quantity is clear in the scalar implicature by ‘able to’ and
‘small’.
6-He: Do not you feel lonely sometimes?
She: Sometimes? Yes, I do and …
He: And what?
She: Aha! Am I on a social visit or to give you an account of my private life?
• +> He is behind something that at that age, does she feel lonely like him, or
something else? The difference is that she has friends visiting her all the time
,whereas he has nothing. A conversational implicatures where flouting of the
maxim of quantity is evident. Another implicatures is in the last line where the
maxim of relation is clear.
45
7-He: Let me bring you coffee first …I will be back soon.
She: still moving about like a small child.
• +> She is commenting on his way of moving may be because of his age or other
factors. Also , the verb ‘moving’ can be interpreted as behaving ,since she has
spent more than one hour without anything to be offered.
• A conversational implicatures with the maxim of quality. Using ‘first’ stops the
possibility of violating this maxim.
8-She: I gave up smoking three years ago…Have you forgotten?
He: I did too only a year ago.
• +> Both are not smokers now.
• A conversational implicatures suspended the quality maxim. It is quite easy to a
speaker to suspend the implicatures (only) using the expression ‘at least’ : ‘I did
too at least a year ago’. Also ,it can be cancelled by adding further information
,often following the expression ‘in fact’: I did too only a year ago, in fact , ten
months from now.
46
9-She: I’ll finish some paper work and be back.
• +>She intends to do part of the work. This is realized as a scalar implicature <all
,most, many, some, few>.
• A conversational implicatures where flouting the quantity maxim is clear.
10-She: whenever she writes a letter to her uncle she includes lines of verse.
• +> Her granddaughter is either studying literary subjects and writing verse ,or
quoting verse without studying literary subjects , or reading poetry without
writing.
• A conversational implicature with flouting of the quality maxim.
11-She: To the bus. Perhaps it is repaired now and they are waiting for
me….Thank you for the coffee.
He: Thanks for the visit. Do it often….
• +> She has finished her visit. The reason that led he to this visit is repairing the
bus. So she lives away from him.
• A conversational implicature of the quality maxim where flouting is clear in using
‘perhaps’.
47
12-She: They repaired the bus quickly and took whoever was
nearby, leaving the others behind?
He: What will you do?
She: I will wait for the next one.
He: When will it arrive?
She: Within an hour as well.
• +> They repaired the bus and left many behind and she is
one of them. Her decision is to wait the next one.
• More than one conversational implicature here: the first one
is related to the flouting of the maxim of manner by using
‘whoever’ and ‘others’. The second one is flouting the maxim
of quality by using ‘within’ , and this maxim ,on the other
hand is kept by using ‘the next’.
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