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Grice’s view of implicature raises even more basic questions. What is the ratio-nale behind the co-operative principle and maxims? Are there just the nine max-ims Grice mentioned, or might others be needed, as he suggested himself ? It might be tempting to add a maxim every time a regularity has to be accounted for. However, this would be entirely ad hoc. What criteria, then, do individual maxims have to meet? Could the number of maxims be not expanded but reduced? How are the maxims to be used in inference? Grice himself seems to think that the hearer uses the assumption that the speaker has observed the maxims as a premise in inference. Others have tried to reinterpret the maxims as ‘conver-sational postulates’ (Gordon and Lakoff 1975), or even as code-like rules which take semantic representations of sentences and descriptions of context as input, and yield pragmatic representations of utterances as output (Gazdar 1979). The flavour of such proposals can be seen from the following remarks:
DOI link for Grice’s view of implicature raises even more basic questions. What is the ratio-nale behind the co-operative principle and maxims? Are there just the nine max-ims Grice mentioned, or might others be needed, as he suggested himself ? It might be tempting to add a maxim every time a regularity has to be accounted for. However, this would be entirely ad hoc. What criteria, then, do individual maxims have to meet? Could the number of maxims be not expanded but reduced? How are the maxims to be used in inference? Grice himself seems to think that the hearer uses the assumption that the speaker has observed the maxims as a premise in inference. Others have tried to reinterpret the maxims as ‘conver-sational postulates’ (Gordon and Lakoff 1975), or even as code-like rules which take semantic representations of sentences and descriptions of context as input, and yield pragmatic representations of utterances as output (Gazdar 1979). The flavour of such proposals can be seen from the following remarks:
Grice’s view of implicature raises even more basic questions. What is the ratio-nale behind the co-operative principle and maxims? Are there just the nine max-ims Grice mentioned, or might others be needed, as he suggested himself ? It might be tempting to add a maxim every time a regularity has to be accounted for. However, this would be entirely ad hoc. What criteria, then, do individual maxims have to meet? Could the number of maxims be not expanded but reduced? How are the maxims to be used in inference? Grice himself seems to think that the hearer uses the assumption that the speaker has observed the maxims as a premise in inference. Others have tried to reinterpret the maxims as ‘conver-sational postulates’ (Gordon and Lakoff 1975), or even as code-like rules which take semantic representations of sentences and descriptions of context as input, and yield pragmatic representations of utterances as output (Gazdar 1979). The flavour of such proposals can be seen from the following remarks:
ABSTRACT
The tactic adopted here is to examine some of the data that would, or should be, covered by Grice’s quantity maxim and then propose a relatively simple formal solution to the problem of describing the behaviour of that data. This solution may be seen as a special case of Grice’s quantity maxim, or as an alternative to it, or as merely a conventional rule for assigning one class of conversational meanings to one class of utterance.
