Grice's Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature in Pragmatics

Grice and the Cooperative Principle

Grice and the so-called "cooperative principle" are central to the history of pragmatics. The principle is formulated as follows: "Make your 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."

This principle is not prescriptive or normative; it is descriptive. It is the first rational condition shared by all communication, so that a message can be intelligible and meaningful. Participants who do not respect the cooperative principle make the conversation incoherent and absurd. This standard operates in normal conversations and is among the conditions Grice took from the philosopher Kant.

The Four Categories of Maxims

1. Category of Quantity

Concerns the volume or amount of information that should be transmitted. It is subdivided into two maxims:

• Make your contribution as informative as required for the current purposes of the dialogue.
• Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

2. Category of Quality

Try to make your contribution one that is true. Do not say what you believe to be false, and do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

3. Category of Relation

Be relevant. Say things that are related to the current topic, so that participants' contributions connect with what is being discussed.

4. Category of Manner

Be clear. This category contains four submaxims: avoid obscurity of expression; avoid ambiguity; be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity); and be orderly.

These maxims should not be seen as prescriptive categories but as descriptive ones. Behavior is evaluated according to linguistic conventions; if speakers do not follow them, they face consequences such as social sanctions, for example expulsion from a group.

Key Distinction: Saying and Implicating

Grice's important point is that a statement has two levels: what is said, which corresponds to the propositional content and is evaluated logically in terms of truth or falsity, and what is communicated, which includes any information conveyed through wording beyond the propositional content. The latter are called implicatures.

Implicatures are of two classes: conventional and conversational. Conventional implicatures are driven directly by the meaning of the words used and are not generated through the intervention of other principles. Conversational implicatures, by contrast, derive from factors such as social, aesthetic, or moral considerations, and are divided into general and particular types. General conversational implicatures depend on the context of utterance, while particular ones depend directly on the specific utterance.

Breaches of the Maxims

A speaker may breach a maxim in four ways:

• a) Violation: The speaker discreetly fails to observe a maxim, without ostentation. A single error can mislead the listener, so the speaker is usually guilty of misleading.
• b) Opting out: The speaker openly suspends the maxim and the cooperative principle. For example: "I cannot continue talking about this."
• c) Conflict: When fulfilling one maxim cannot be achieved without failing another, a conflict arises, and the speaker must decide which to prioritize.
• d) Flouting: The speaker blatantly fails to observe a maxim, expecting the listener to recognize the intended implicature. For example, saying "Nice weather, isn't it?" during a storm.

Generating conversational implicatures requires three elements: the statement itself; the contextual factors that shape the context; and the cooperative principle and maxims.

How Implicatures Are Derived

In general, when someone says p and implies q, the listener reconstructs q through the following reasoning:

1. The speaker is observing the maxims and the cooperative principle.
2. In order to maintain this, the speaker must intend q.
3. The speaker thinks the listener can infer q as a second condition.

Example: (p) "He is poor but honest" implies (q) that poor people are not usually honest.

Effects of Maxims on Implicatures

• a) The first type is apparent implicature, where there is no real violation. For example, "Peter has two children" when he actually has three implies he is not infertile, since the statement contradicts something previous.
• b) The second type arises when a conflict between maxims makes the listener infer something beyond the literal meaning. For example, "Is the film good?" answered with "It starts at ten" violates the maxim of relation, implying an evasive answer.
• c) The third type arises when the speaker openly flouts a maxim. For example, "Are you good at mathematics?" answered with "I am good at languages" implies a relation of negation, meaning the speaker is not good at mathematics.

Examples of flouting the maxim of quality include: Martin spends money recklessly, and someone says "Martin is rich because he won the lottery easily," which violates quality, implying that the wealth was obtained in an illegal way. Another example is saying "You look as good as ever!" to someone who looks bad, which is irony. Frequent flouting of the quality maxim produces rhetorical figures such as irony, metaphor, and others.

Ducrot and Anscombre: Theories of Argumentation

Ducrot and Anscombre start from a shared premise with Austin and Searle: pragmatics concerns the adequacy of utterances to the external situation. Argumentation theory, however, concerns adequacy to the internal situation, that is, the linguistic structure itself, rather than to a particular situation.

Argumentation theory, as represented by Anscombre and Ducrot, approaches rhetoric and the whole strategy of organizing discourse from an internal perspective, while Anglo-Saxon pragmatics (Grice) takes an external one.

Logical and Discursive Argumentation

From a logical point of view, argumentation is a type of reasoning. For Anscombre and Ducrot, an argumentative sequence presents one statement e1 as an argument for admitting another statement e2. The statements e1 are arguments that lead the listener to accept the conclusion e2.

To demonstrate is not the same as to argue. Demonstration is a formal test of the validity of a conclusion, while discursive argumentation is related to classical logic only partially.

Example: Marie speaks English and French, and Marie is very clever. From the point of view of classical logic, the two statements are acceptable and can reach the same conclusion. From the point of view of discursive argumentation, however, the acceptable point of view is only the first statement.

Ducrot and Anscombre extend the formula: e1 may give arguments for e2 (the conclusion), but this is not enough to accept e2. The linguistic structure of e1 must meet certain conditions that authorize it as an argument.

The distinction between logical argumentation and discursive argumentation is that in logical argumentation the premises of a given type lead to a conclusion determined in advance. To obtain the conclusion from premises, the logical rules are sufficient. In discursive argumentation, by contrast, a fixed number of premises is not established in advance, and the conclusion is not automatically derived. The accumulation of arguments does not impose the necessity of a logical conclusion.

In discursive argumentation, arguments may be implicit, present in the linguistic environment or in the discourse situation. Some features may suggest a linguistic family. For example, "It is raining, so let's not go out" has an implicit conclusion: it is not necessary to hurry. Such implied conclusions are called implicit conclusions.

Another characteristic is that the arguments used in discursive argumentation do not all have the same argumentative force.