ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the key ideas of three ‘neo-Gricean’ pragmatic theories. These are theories which developed from Grice’s ideas, retaining the idea that maxim-like principles guide pragmatic inference. Two of the approaches discussed here, developed by Larry Horn and Stephen Levinson, propose a reduction in the number of maxims and suggest that principles interact in utterance interpretation. The third approach, developed by Geoffrey Leech, proposed a greater number of maxims, including maxims of politeness. These ideas played an important role in the development of (im)politeness theories. Leech also made the influential suggestion that we should distinguish ‘general pragmatics’ from ‘pragmalinguistics’ and ‘socio-pragmatics’.
