ABSTRACT
People sometimes speak in monologues alone in a room or on a mountain top. Perhaps one of the most obvious things to say about conversation is that it is an extremely cooperative form of interaction. Grice attempted to describe some of the ways in which participants in a conversation may adhere to a basic principle of cooperation. He begins by formulating a general cooperative principle. Grice has provided some form of analysis of how participants in a conversation may adhere to a basic cooperative principle. Having begun by acknowledging the essentially cooperative nature of conversation, the next obvious feature is that conversations are more than collections of words arranged into grammatical strings and juxtaposed in time. But conversation is more than a cooperative form of verbal interaction rooted in a huge reservoir of background knowledge and assumptions, it is also the context in which the multifarious channels of human communication operate and interact.
