CONVERSATIONAL PRINCIPLE: COOPERATION

CONVERSATIONAL PRINCIPLE: COOPERATION

People are interpreting other people's language - and expecting other people to interpret their own - all the time, apparently with a surprising degree of accuracy. This happens, as we have seen in the previous chapter, because words and sentences are used by people in certain contexts to do something. They have certain functions.

For example, depending on who is speaking to whom and in what context, the following sentence has different functions:

The window is open (Source, Cook, 1989)

Thus, it may be an expression of worry if it is uttered by wife to husband in the middle of the night. It may be an order, if it is uttered by the head-teacher to a student. It may also be an interpretation if it is uttered by a detective to the assistant.

However, as we have seen in the previous chapter, there are problems with the functional interpretation of the language, because not all functions can be neatly labelled, and because there is not always a neat correspondence between a single utterance and a single function. Thus, the following questions might be asked:

1. If people can mean different things with the same words, how do human beings interpret what is meant from what is said?

2. Why is there a divergence of function and form, or why do not people speak directly and say what they mean?

For an answer we have to look at the work of Paul Grice, who attempted to explain how, by means of shared rules of conversations, competent language-users manage to understand one another.

Like Austin before him, Grice was invited to give lectures at Harvard University, and it was there in 1967 that he first outlined his theory of implicture. A shorter version of these lectures was published in 1975 in a paper Logic and conversation. Later, Grice expanded upon his earlier work and it proved to be one of the most influential theories in the development of pragmatics. Grice's theory is an attempt at explaining how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant, from the level of expressed meaning to the level of implied meaning.

I. CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE: IMPLICATURES AND INFERENCES

The basic assu 414b15e mption in conversation is that (according to Grice, 1975), unless otherwise indicated, the participants are adhering to some shared rules of conversation, which he calls the Co-operative Principle. Let's have a look at an example (Levinson, 1983) :

E.g. A: I hope you brought the bread and the cheese.

B: Ah, I brought the bread.

In order for A to understand B's reply, A has to assume that B is co-operating, and has given B the right amount of information. But he didn't mention the cheese. If he had brought the cheese he would have said so. He must intend that A infer that what is not mentioned was not brought. In this case B has conveyed more than he said via a conversational implicature.

Before going into Grice's theory of conversational implicature, we shall try to clarify two terms, implicature and inference, and the corresponding verbs to imply and to infer. The verb to imply is used when the speaker generates some meaning beyond the semantic meaning of the words. Implicature (term devised by Grice) refers to the implied meaning generated intentionally by the speaker.

Infer, on the other hand, refers to the situation in which the hearer deduces meaning from available evidence. Inference is the inferred meaning deduced by the hearer, which may or may not be the same as the speaker's intended implicature.

Here is an example which illustrates the distinction between implicature and inference:

E.g.

The following example is taken from a children's book, set in Holland under William the Silent, during the war with Spain. Maurice was a boy caught up in the events; Theo was a manservant:

Tears filled his eyes; he cried easily in these days, nor having full control of himself, and Theo's fate caused him great grief. The Duchess had told him that she had been able to discover nothing, and therefore it was assumed that he head been released as entirely innocent. Maurice was convinced that nothing of the kind had happened, and assumed that the Duchess had found out that Theo was dead and had invented the agreeable solution in order not to distress him. He could not do anything about it and had accepted the statement in silence, but he fretted a great deal over Theo's death.

(source: Thomas, 1995:58-59)

Here, the Duchess implied that Theo was all right. Maurice understood what she had implied, but nevertheless inferred the opposite (that Theo was dead).

Here is another example (source: Thomas, 1995:59):

Some years ago, Jenny Thomas went to stay with her brother and his family, including his son, aged 5. She had had with her an electric toothbrush, into which she had recently put new batteries. Her brother asked to see the toothbrush, but when he tried to operate it, it would not work:

J.T.: That's funny. I thought I put in some new batteries.

Nephew: (Going extremely red): The ones in my engine still work.

Here is Thomas's interpretation of what was going on in the above conversation:

J.T's remark had been a genuine expression of surprised irritation, addressed to the family at large and she did not expect any response. However, her nephew misinterpreted the force of her utterance as an accusation and inferred (wrongly) that he was a suspect. According to Thomas, we can spell out the interpretation of the boy's contribution as follows:

'Step 1 The first step in any interpretation is to assign sense and reference to the words. In this case, this was not difficult; the boy was asserting that he had batteries in the engine of his toy train which were in working order.

Step 2: The hearer works out the speaker's intention in uttering those words; they understood him to have implied that he was not responsible for the fact that the batteries were flat. The pragmatic force of his utterance was to deny guilt.

Step 3: Nevertheless, everyone present inferred from the evidence (from their knowledge of how little boys behave, from the fact that he blushed, from the attempt to deflect attention from his toy, and from the fact that he spoke at all) that he had in fact switched the batteries.'

Grice's theory is designed to explain how hearers get from level 1 to level 2, from what is said to what is implied. Steps 1 and 2 fall within the realm of pragmatics; the third step depends on more than just linguistic factors and needs to be explained within a more general theory, that of social interaction.

II. CO-OPERATIVE PRINCIPLE

Let's consider the following scenario (from Yule, 1996:36). There is a woman sitting on a park bench and a large dog lying on the ground in front of the bench. A man comes along and sits down on the bench.

Man: Does your dog bite?

Woman: No

(The man reaches down to pet the dog. The dog bite's the man's hand)

Man: Ouch! You said your dog doesn't bite.

Woman: He doesn't. But that's not my dog.

The problem here is the man's assumption that more was communicated than was said. In other words, the man assumed that the woman, by saying NO, meant that the dog lying at her feet was her dog, and it didn't bite.

From the man's perspective, the woman's answer provides less information than expected: she might be expected to provide the information stated in the last line (But that's not my dog}.

The concept of there being an expected amount of information provided in conversation is just one aspect of the more general idea that people involved in a conversation will co-operate with each other. In most circumstances, the assumption of co-operation is so pervasive that it can be stated as a co-operative principle, which was elaborated by H.P.Grice (1975) in four sub-principles or maxims. 

Grice's principle is formulated as follows: 'Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged'.

According to this principle we interpret language on the assumption that its sender is obeying (observing) four maxims:

1. Maxim of quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purpose of the exchange. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

2. Maxim of quality: Do not say what you believe to be false; Do not say that for which you lack evidence.

3. Maxim of Relation: Be relevant

4. Maxim of Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression; Avoid ambiguity; Be brief; Be orderly.

Using this assumption, combined with the knowledge of the world, the receiver can reason from the literal, semantic meaning of what is said to the pragmatic meaning and infer what the sender is intending to do with his/her words.

E.g.: A neighbour to you:

Sorry, dear. I saw you were home. My cat got stuck in the tree over there.

(Adapted from Cool, 1989)

The hearer (you) starts from the knowledge and experience of the world, that a cat is likely to be very unhappy stuck in a tree, that a human is able to free such a cat, etc.

According to the co-operative principle the hearer assumes that the neighbour is telling the truth (not playing a joke); that she is being relevant (compare with: The tree is in blossom). So, the utterance is interpreted as a request for help in freeing the cat. The pragmatic meaning would be: Come and free the cat which is stuck in the tree.

The maxims are unstated assumptions we have in conversations. We assume that people are normally going to provide an appropriate amount of information; we assume that they are telling the truth, being relevant, and trying to be as clear as they can. Because these principles are assumed in normal interaction, speakers rarely mention them. However, there are certain expressions used to mark that speakers may be in danger of not fully adhering to the principles. These expressions are called 'hedges'. The following examples are taken from Yule (1996:38-39):

E.g.:

Quality:

a. As far as I know, they're married.

b. I may be mistaken, but I thought I saw a wedding ring on her finger.

c. I'm not sure if this is right, but I heard it was a secret ceremony in Hawaii.

d. He couldn't live without her, I guess.

Quantity:

a. As you probably know, I am afraid of dogs.

b. So, to cut a long story short, we grabbed our stuff and ran.

c. I won't bore you with all the details, but it was an exciting trip.

Relation:

a. I don't know if this is important, but some of the files are missing.

b. This may sound like a dumb question, but whose handwriting is this?

c. Not to change the subject, but is this related to the budget?

Manner:

a. This may be a bit confused, but I remember being in a car.

b. I'm not sure if this makes sense, but the car had no lights.

c. I don't know if this is clear at all, but I think the other car was reversing.

There are cases in which not all four maxims can be observed. Brevity and truth often pull in opposite directions (a short answer is often simplified to the point of distortion). Legal discourse and scientific discourse often sacrifice the maxim of quantity to the maxim of quality. Maxims of quantity and manner are often at odds. To be clear one sometimes needs to be long-winded.

III. FLOUTING THE MAXIMS (GENERATING IMPLICATURE)

The situations which chiefly interested Grice were those in which a speaker blatantly, deliberately, fails to observe a maxim, not with any intention of deceiving or misleading, but because the speaker wants to prompt the hearer to look for a meaning which is different from the expressed meaning. These are intended violations of the maxims; the sender intends the receiver to perceive them as such. If the sender does not intend violations to be perceived as such, or if the receiver does not realise that they are deliberate, then communication degenerates into lying, or simply breaks down.

Flouts exploiting maxims of Quality

Flouts which exploit the maxim of Quality occur when the speaker says something which is blatantly untrue.

E.g. (source, Thomas, 1995:55)

Late on Christmas Eve 1993 an ambulance is sent to pick up a man who has collapsed in Newcastle city centre. The man is drunk and vomits all over the ambulanceman who goes to help him. The ambulanceman says:

'Great, that's really great! That's made my Christmas!'

Here an implicature is generated by the speaker's saying something which is patently false. According to Grice (cf. Thomas), the deductive process might work like this:

i)            The ambulanceman has expressed pleasure at having someone vomit over him.

ii)           There is no example in recorded history of people being delighted at having someone vomit over them.

iii)         I have no reason to believe that the ambulanceman is trying to deceive us in any way.

iv)         Unless the ambulanceman's utterance is entirely pointless, he must be trying to put across some other proposition.

v)          This must be some obviously related proposition.

vi)         The most obviously related proposition is the exact opposite of the one he has expressed.

vii)       The ambulanceman is extremely annoyed at having the drunk vomit over him.

Flouts exploiting the maxim of Quantity

A flout exploiting a maxim of Quantity occurs when a speaker blatantly gives more or less information than the situation requires. We have already seen one instance of a person giving less information than required, in the example with the dog that has bitten the man. Here is a similar one:

E.g. A: How are we getting to the party?

B: Well, we're getting there by car.

B blatantly gives less information than A needs, thereby generating the implicature that, while she and her friends have made arrangements, A will not be travelling with them.

3. Flouts exploiting the maxims of Relation

The maxim of Relation is exploited by making a response which is very obviously irrelevant to the topic at hand.

E.g.

A: Would you like a pizza?

B: Ask a child if he would like a pie. (the English version of the Romanian Vrei calule ovaz?)

In this example, B does not provide a 'yes' or 'no' answer and he appears to flout the maxim of relation. B's response implicates that the answer to the question is 'Obviously yes'. The additional meaning here is that, because the answer is so obvious, the question did not need to be asked in the first place.

4. Flouts exploiting the maxim of Manner

The following is an example of flouting the maxim of Manner:

E.g. (taken form Thomas, 1995:71)

This interaction occurred during a radio interview with an un-named official from United States Embassy in Port-au-Prince Haiti:

Interviewer:  Did the United States Government play any part in Duvalier's departure? Did they, for example, actively encourage him to leave?

Official: I would not try to steer you away from that conclusion.

The official could simply have replied Yes. The actual response is extremely long-winded.

Flouting the co-operative principle in order to make a point more forcefully also explains:

metaphors ('Queen Victoria was made of iron')

hyperbole ('I've got millions of beers in my cellar')

irony and sarcasm ('I love it when you sing out of key all the time')

humour (e.g. puns)

5. Other ways of not observing the maxims:

Opting out, i.e refusing to answer, is another way of non-observing the maxims Such an example is Bill Clinton's response to a journalist who was asking him about the Whitewater affair, a scandal in which Bill and Hillary were involved. When the journalist asked the question, Clinton took his microphone off, got out of his seat, told the journalist he'd had his two questions and went off.

Suspending the (universality of) maxims

There are occasions/situations/cultures when it appears that there is no expectation that all the maxims will be observed. Compare, for instance, an interrogation, where we would not expect that the maxim of Relation should be observed by the defendants, with a confessional, where we expect the opposite.

Infringing:

A speaker who, with no intention of generating an implicature and with no intention of deceiving, fails to observe a maxim is said to 'infringe' the maxim. For example, a speaker may fail to observe a maxim because of imperfect linguistic performance (foreigners, young child speaking, nervous speakers, etc.)

In this chapter we have explored one approach to explaining how people interpret indirectness. Before going on to the next chapter, we should mention some of the problems with Grice's theory. The main problems are:

It can be difficult to distinguish between different categories of non-observance

Sometimes it can be difficult to determine which maxim is being invoked, since maxims seem to overlap sometimes;

Sometimes an utterance has a range of possible interpretations. How do we know which implications are intended?

Grice's four maxims are not all of the same order, they seem to be rather different in nature.

IV. SUMMARY

In 1967, Grice outlined his theory of implicture. Grice's theory is an attempt at explaining how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant, from the level of expressed meaning to the level of implied meaning.

Implicature (term devised by Grice) refers to the implied meaning generated intentionally by the speaker. Infer, on the other hand, refers to the situation in which the hearer deduces meaning from available evidence. Inference is the inferred meaning deduced by the hearer, which may or may not be the same as the speaker's intended implicature.

Grice's co-operative principle is formulated as follows: 'Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged'.

Maxim of quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purpose of the exchange. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

Maxim of quality: Do not say what you believe to be false; Do not say that for which you lack evidence.

Maxim of Relation: Be relevant

Maxim of Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression; Avoid ambiguity; Be brief; Be orderly.

The maxims are unstated assumptions we have in conversations. We assume that people are normally going to provide an appropriate amount of information; we assume that they are telling the truth, being relevant, and trying to be as clear as they can.

Flouting the maxims generates implicatures

The situations which chiefly interested Grice were those in which a speaker blatantly, deliberately, fails to observe a maxim, not with any intention of deceiving or misleading, but because the speaker wants to prompt the hearer to look for a meaning which is different from the expressed meaning.

. Which maxims of the co-operative principle are being flouted in the following, and why?

a. I think I'll go for a W-A-L-K (spelling the word letter by letter in front of a dog)

b. [At a dinner party]: Is there anywhere I can powder my nose?

c. This meal is delicious (said by a guest who finds the food disgusting)

d. Child:  I'm going to watch Match of the Day now.

Parent: What was that Maths homework you said you had?

(Source: Cook, 1989)

Which are the maxims flouted and he implicatures generated in the following examples:

[A is working at a computer in one of the department's lab when she experiences a problem]

A: Can you help me?

B: Graeme's office hour is in five minutes

[A is a 14 year boy and has just come back from school; B is his mother]

B: How was school today?

A: Oh, I scored two goals during the football match.

[Victor has been buried up to his neck in the back garden by an irate builder. His wife, Margaret, comes out]

M: What are you doing?

V: I'm wallpapering the spare bedroom, what the hell do you think I'm doing?

(One Foot in the Grave, BBC 12/11/96)

[This is part of the queen's speech at the anniversary of her 40th year on the throne. It had been a bad year for the queen - marital difficulties of her children, the Windsor Palace had gone up in flames]

Queen:  1992 is not a year which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure.

Analyse the following extract in relation to the Co-operative Principle:

[Context: a television serial, called 'Boys from the Blackstuff, follows the lives of a group of men facing unemployment in Liverpool. This scene takes place in a Department of Employment. Chrissie is under suspicion for illegally claiming unemployment benefit.]

Clerk: It seems from your files, Mr. Todd, that one of our inspectors has visited your house on two separate occasions during the past ten days without receiving an answer.

Ch. Ah, what a shame

C: You were out?

Ch:  Looks that way doesn't it?

C: Can you tell me where you were?

Ch:  I might be able to if you tell me when you called.

C: It's the...morning of Tuesday the third, and...the afternoon of Thursday the 12th

[There is a pause]

Ch:  Haven't a clue.

C: Were you employed during those days?

Ch:  Who, me?

C: Look, have you got a job, Mr. Todd?

Ch: Oh yeah, I just come here for the company and the pleasant surroundings.

C: (patiently, and not without sympathy) You haven't answered my question.

Ch:  [Looking away] I haven't worked in over a year.

C: Right, Mr. Todd, that's all.

(Chrissie stands)

C: We will, however, be making further visits to your house in due course.

Ch:  I'll bake a cake.

Discuss the following exchanges in terms of the CP and implicatures

( Thomas, 1995:65):

The speaker is Rupert Allason (author, M.P. and expert on the British intelligence services). He is discussing the identity of the so-called 'Fifth Man':

It was either Graham Mitchell or Roger Hollis and I don't think it was Roger Hollis.

. (Thomas, 1995:68)

B was on a long journey and wanted to read her book. A was a fellow passenger who wanted to talk to her:

A: What do you do?

B: I'm a teacher.

A: Where do you teach?

B: Outer Mongolia

A: Sorry I asked.

In groups, imagine short dialogues in which the maxims are flouted and implicatures are created.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cameron, R. & Williams, J., 1997, Sentences to Ten Cents;

A Case Study of Relevance and Communicative Success in Non-native/Native Speaker Interaction in a Medical Setting, in Applied Linguistics, 18: 415-445

Clark, H., H., & Gerrig, R., J., 1984, On the Pretense

Theory of Irony, in Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 113, nr.1: 121-126

Sarangi, S., and Slembrouck, S., 1992, Non-cooperation in

Communication: a reassessment of Gricean pragmatics, in Journal of Pragmatics, 17: 117-154

Sperber, D., 1984, Verbal Irony: Pretense or Echoic

Mention?, in Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 113, nr.1: 130-136