Conversational Principle, Maxims and Implicature

 In an attempt to better explain how speakers mean things that they don’t actually say in words, the linguistic philosopher Paul Grice (1967) makes a distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” meanings of utterances. He further argues that a speaker and a hearer are guided by some “conversational principles” in order to make the right references and interpret meaning beyond the linguistic content of an utterance. In this article, we shall be discussing in detail what the above concepts are and how they may enable us to understand how speakers and hearers communicate effectively.

Conversational Maxims

Grice observed that when people talk they try to be “cooperative” and attempt to obey some “cooperative principle” which demands that they make their conversational contributions such as is required, at the stage where it occurred, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk in which they are engaged. The conversational principle operates with some “maxims” in the assumption that the speaker does not say what is false, or irrelevant, or too much or too little.

The maxims are:

QUANTITY

(a)               Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the conversation)

(b)              Do not make your contribution more informative than is required

QUALITY

Try to make your contribution one that is true

(a)               Do not say what you believe to be false

(b)              Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence

RELATION

Be relevant (your contributions should be such that are relevant to the conversation)

Manners in Conversational Principle

Be perspicuous

(a)               Avoid obscurity

(b)              Avoid ambiguity

(c)               Be brief

(d)              Be orderly

The cooperative principle determines the way a hearer can deduce some additional information from an utterance above some “truth-conditional content” of a message, i.e. if I say: “I have a white elephant”, the truth condition content/meaning of this statement is that I actually have an elephant that is white in colour. Anything outside of this is false. Any additional information that is possible in the expression is called “implicature”. 

Conversational implicature actually occurs when the conversational maxims namely quantity, quality, relation (relevance) and manner are seemingly violated, thus “forcing the hearer to make additional assumptions in order to understand the speaker as conveying something true and relevant”. In order words, my saying that I have a white elephant seemingly violates the maxim of quality that urges me not to say what is false, even though there might be some personal meaning that I intend to communicate.

Entailment

When Grice attempted to distinguish between “natural” and “unnatural” meanings of utterances he was actually referring to entailment and implicature. Let me explain.

(i)                I bought a new car

The natural meaning of “I bought a new car” is that at least I paid for a new car which now becomes mine by virtue of the commercial transaction that took place between me and the car dealer. This kind of meaning is what is known as entailment. You can’t talk of someone buying a thing without entailing that someone paid for it or at least reaching an agreement to pay later.

Entailment is more of semantic concept in that it locates meaning from its “truthful” or “logical” property. If I say Q entails R then it follows that if Q is true, R also has to be true. If it is true that Q bought R. Then it true that R has been paid for by Q.

Entailments occur at the level of general meaning and its explicit use has been seen sometimes as a kind of loose paraphrasing technique or summary (Wales, 1989). For example a news headline that says: “Obasanjo runs to America for help” is a brief and truthful essential entailment of a more informative explanation which may be enlarged in the content of the news. Grice attempts to show that when people talk they often move from entailments which the conversational principles are concerned with, to “non-natural” meaning variables that often violate some or all of the principles.

Implicature

As we have earlier noted, implicature is a component of speaker meaning that constitutes an aspect of what is meant without necessarily being part of what is said.Interestingly, speakers usually mean more than they say, especially drawing upon the context of the utterance. Implicatures actually occur when the conversational maxims are violated. A statement like “a child is a child” does not seem to be informative enough and therefore breaks the maxim of quantity. But you know what is meant. Look at other examples:

(i)                Thanks a million (hyperbole)

(ii)              Mirinda – taste the thrill (advert)

(iii)           Who is sufficient all by himself (rhetorical question)

(iv)            Sprite – obey your taste (advert)

Literary devices and advertisements often violate the maxims as we can see above.

Implicatures arise because of interactants’to mutual understanding of the conversational maxims. Non-conventional meanings which arise as a result of flouting some of the maxims become possible since a statement may result in different implicatures in different contexts. This is another way of saying that an implicature is a result of a listener making an inference as the most likely meaning an utterance may have in a given context. The direct implicature of “a child is a child” said at home, may differ if the same statement is made at a school during an inter-house sport. Grice’s “implicature” is synonymous to Yule’s invisible meaning.

CONCLUSION

The conversational principle is assumed to be in operation in a conversation for implicature to take place (Yule, 1996). Implicature occurs because a speaker flouts some or all of the maxims deliberately or for reasons such as linguistic imperfection, socio-cultural reasons, or where violation is already expected in order to encode some particular social meaning. Conversational principles are another attempt at explaining how interactants encode and interpret meaning in different contexts.