5.3 Grice's maxims

When people enter into a conversation, they typically have certain expectations about how the communication will proceed--not about what content will be conveyed, but what the rules of the conversation game will be. Specifically:

• Rational speakers are assumed to be cooperative and hence will try and be truthful and helpful.
• Rational speakers have limited resources and hence will try to transmit a maximum of information with minimal effort.

Under these assumptions, listeners can expect speakers to be truthful, just as informative as is required, relevant, and brief. (There are non-cooperative speech situations, of course. Let's set them aside for now.) Grice (1975) introduced the following principle:

Grice also introduced four maxims of cooperative conversation: Quality, Quantity, Relation, Manner. These are not scientific generalizations. Instead, they're more like contractual obligations; if you break one, you don't falsify it; you just generate interesting consequences. The maxims are stated roughly as follows:

We don't satisfy all these demands all of the time. Sometimes we opt out or encounter a hopeless clash or we might flout ("blatantly fail to fulfill") one or more maxims. Now we'll consider them one by one.

The maxim of Quality is about being truthful. Cooperative speakers obey this at all costs. Without Quality, what we say is untrustworthy, and communication breaks down. For a speaker to signal that they are opting out of the maxim of quality, expressions like the following may be used: "I have no evidence for this, but...", "This may just be a rumor, but..." Opting out (and signaling that choice to the hearer) is different than flouting a maxim. To flout Quality is to fail to fulfill it in an obvious way, which is intended to signal that additional meaning ought to be inferred. Consider how the lack of truth of (20-22) could be used to convey meaning:

The maxim of Quantity is about being informative. Quantity asks speakers to strike a balance between providing new information and providing too much new information. A speaker uttering the sentence in (23) is asserting that Mary has 4 cats, a statement that would be true if, in the relevant world, Mary had exactly 4 cats. It would also technically be true if Mary had 5 cats ("She has 4, in fact 5!"). That weaker reading ("that Mary has at least 4 cats") is true in many worlds (worlds in which Mary has 4 cats, worlds in which Mary has 5 cats, worlds in which Mary has 6 cats, etc.). The weaker meaning is true in more worlds than the stronger meaning ("that Mary has no more than 4 cats"), and so the weaker meaning is less informative. Cooperative speakers are expected to be as informative as they can be, and since a speaker could have said "Mary has 5 cats" but didn't, the stronger meaning of "Mary has 4 cats" can be inferred. This is how (23) implicates that Mary has no more than 4 cats.

A similar situation arises in (24). Instead of a numeric scale as in (23), the adjective 'good' in (24) evokes a scale of work quality: from 'satisfactory' to 'good' to 'excellent' to 'outstanding' (for example). Crucially, the statement in (24) about Sue's work being "good" is weaker than expected. (24) therefore implies that a stronger statement (that Sue's work was not only good, but excellent) is not true or not known to be true. This is how (24) implicates that Sue's work is not excellent.

To opt out of the maxim of Quantity, speakers can use expressions like: "No comment", "I am not at liberty to say any more", "I probably don't need to say this, but...". An example of flouting Quantity is this one in (25) that should now be familiar.

The maxim of Relation is about being relevant. We assume that conversation participants are working to address some underlying question or questions --- could be highly abstract or difficult to articulate, but nonetheless present. Participants are expected to offer information that helps answer such questions. To opt out of Relation, speakers use expressions like "I know this is off topic, but...". To flout Relation, a speaker fails to uphold the maxim and generates an implicature, as in (26-27).

Lastly, the maxim of Manner is about being clear and concise. To opt out speakers might say something like "To make a short story long". The maxim of Manner is useful for helping interpret the extra or alternative meanings that arise when non-standard linguistic forms are used. The generalization is that non-standard expressions (prolixity, ambiguity, omitted arguments, etc.) are used to carry non-standard meanings. Consider what additional meaning is implicated when Manner is flouted in (28-31).

It was noted earlier that implicatures (specifically, conversational implicatures) are cancellable, reinforceable, calculable, context-dependent, and calculable. The previous page noted the felicity of cancelling an implicature ("Mary has 4 cats. In fact she has 5." cancels "Mary has no more than 4 cats") and reinforcing it ("Mary has 4 cats. She has no more than 4."). Calculability relates directly to the maxims. Implicatures have the property of being calculable in that the implicated meaning can be explained by tracing the way the listener infers them from (i) what was said and (ii) the Cooperative Principle, as follows:

• Speaker S is presumed to be observing the Maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle.
• S's uttering p is not consistent with (a) unless S thinks that q.
• S knows that I know this and has done nothing to prevent me from thinking that q.
• Therefore S must have intended to communicate q.

As a last example, consider (32) and (33), which say very different things.

To go on to section 5.4 on "Conversational vs. conventional implicature", click here.