ABSTRACT
In this chapter, there are several terms (such as direct vs indirectspeech acts; truth value; sense and reference; utterances vs sentences; flouting, violating, infringing and opting out of the Cooperative Principle (CP)) for which pre-understanding would not be unhelpful. While H. P. Grice was developing his views on language, work by other philosophers such as J. L. Austin and J. R. Searle was largely concerned with the relationship between direct and indirect speech acts, and the concept that you could ‘do’ things with words: language was seen to be as much of an action as opening a door or closing a window. These proponents of the ‘use theory’ had moved away from the truth value approach, as well as from the reliance on sense and reference as the source of meaning. Along with Speech Act Theory, Grice’s work on the CP initiated the current interest in pragmatics, and led to its development as a separate discipline within linguistics.
