ABSTRACT
Maxims of Conversation In his William James Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1967, H.P. Grice provided a range of insights that would prove to be hugely influential in the development of modern pragmatics. During the course of the seven talks that made up the lecture series, Grice explored a number of issues relating to meaning and conversation. His famous maxims of conversation – presented in Lecture II, alongside his cooperative principle – are probably the most well known aspect of this work. In this second lecture, Grice elaborated on
earlier work (see Grice 1957) in which he argued that communication is a rational, purposive, inferential activity. As well as this (indeed, because of this) Grice proposed that communication was fundamentally cooperative, and that participants work towards a ‘common aim’ (1967: lecture II, 11; 1989: 29). Early in this lecture he formulated his cooperative principle: ‘“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”’ (1967: lecture II, 6; 1987: 26). But the cooperative principle (or CP, as it is
often referred to) is quite vague. What makes a ‘contribution’ cooperative? Grice’s answer to this question was that the CP can be broken down into a number of different maxims of conversation – Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner – the idea being that speakers will, on the whole, make sure that their conversational contributions comply with these maxims, and hence the CP. Grice presented the four maxims as follows:
The category of Quantity relates to the quantity of information to be provided, and under it fall the following maxims:
(1) ‘Make your contribution as informative as required (for the current purposes of the exchange)’, and possibly
(2) ‘Do not make your contribution more informative than is required’ [ … ]
Under the category of Quality falls a supermaxim: ‘Try to make your contribution one that is true’, and two more specific maxims:
(1) ‘Do not say what you believe to be false’
(2) ‘Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence’.
