In this post I had merely presented a terminology, one which involved the term “implicature”. We’ve seen that in some situations, besides what is said, there is something that is implicated and the latter can be either conventional (given by the conventional meaning of words) or conversational. I will now make a short review of the second part of Grice’s Logic and conversation (1975), the one which introduces the cooperation principle (CP) and thus explains our question No. 2, formulated in the last post as: how does the hearer understand what we say, when we mean more than we say?
For Grice, human talk exchanges are “purposive, indeed rational, behaviour” and therefore “cooperative efforts”. This means that, in them, “each participant recognizes, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction” (Grice, [1975]1989, p. 26). It follows that it is possible that some moves are acceptable (in view of the shared goal), while others are not. For example:
(1) A: Do you know what time it is?
B1: It’s half past ten
B2: My coffee is hot
It is easily acceptable that there’s at least an intuitive difference between B1 and B2: the first, comports with some sort of principle, whereas the second doesn’t. From this intuitive difference Grice puts forward a “rough general principle” of the sort: “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” (ibid.) This is the Cooperation Principle (henceforth, CP).
Now, in this “rough” form, the cooperation principle wouldn’t be of much use. If one’s verbal conduct would not comport with the principle and the analyst would go on and say “He violated the CP”, no rocket science would have been produced. Therefore, Grice divides this principle into 4 maxims. Any sort of violation, he says, must fall under these 4 maxims: Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. I’ll just put them down and then say something about them.
Quantity
1. Make your contribution as informative as is required.
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.Quality
1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.Relation
1. Be relevant
Manner
1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief.
4. Be orderly. (Grice, 1989, pp. 26-27)
How is this related to the notion of “conversational implicature”? Well, if the speaker “violates” a maxim or simply “opts out” of the CP entirely, then the relation between CP and conversational implicature is indeed scanty. However, it can be the case that the speaker flouts or exploits a maxim, i.e. he or she blatantly fails to fulfil it, knowing that the hearer – faced with this problem “How can what the speaker said be reconciled with the CP?” – will be able to understand what the speaker has implicated.
Consequently, with the introduction of CP, the conversational implicature can be characterized as such:
A man who, by (in, when) saying (or making as if to say) that p has implicated that q, may be said to have conversationally implicated that q, provided that (1) he is to be presumed to have observed the CP, (2) he is aware that q is required in order to make his saying p consistent with the CP, (3) the speaker thinks that it is within the competence of the hearer to work out, or grasp intuitively that q is required
So I am able to say p and conversationally implicate q if: the hearer has no reason to suppose that I am opting out of the CP, if I let the hearer suppose that, if I somehow (conversationally) make him move towards q (with the use of meaning, context, background knowledge etc).
I’ll give two of Grice’s examples:
After Miss X’s paralysing performance, a sequence of boisterous and out of tune melodies, A remarks:
(a1): Miss X sang “Home Sweet Home”
(a2): Miss X produced a series of sounds that correspond closely with the score of “Home Sweet Home”
Why would A choose a2 instead of a1? In order to implicate “some striking difference between Miss X’s performance and those to which the word “singing” is usually applied”, by flouting the maxim of Manner (introducing unnecessary obscurity).
A, to his wife:
(a1) You are the cream in my coffee.
Again, literally, this is false. The fact that his wife is not the cream in his coffee is, strictly speaking, a truism. He is therefore doing something else, while flouting the maxim of Quality (being untruthful), and that is using a metaphor.
This is pretty much it. I will talk about Grice’s critics in a future post. But for now (and at least from what is said in Logic and Conversation) this is the CP.
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