Meaning in context

Consider the following exchanges:

(1) Paul: Can you put the washing out?

Sarah: It’s raining!

Paul: OK.

(2) Sally: Has Sarah revealed her takeover plans?

Lynn: She’s keeping her cards close to her chest.

Sally: Ah, I suspected as much.

(3) Sarah: You can’t sack your own brother-in-law!

Alan: Business is business!

(4) Steve: Could you tell me the time?

Claire: Yes, it’s twenty past four.

(5) Dad: Were you born in a barn?

Daughter: (Closes the door)

If you’re a native speaker of English, none of these exchanges will seem particularly odd: it is only when we stop and think about them that their strangeness becomes apparent. In the first two examples, the response appears to bear no relation to the question actually posed, yet Paul accepts Sarah’s response in (1) as an answer to his request, while in (2), Lynn’s apparently irrelevant reply, about a card game which has not even been mentioned, is interpreted by Sally as a helpful contribution. Alan’s reply to Sarah in (3) is a tautology, and therefore appears to convey no information whatsoever. We probably don’t even notice that Claire’s response to Steve’s question in (4) does not actually address the question posed (‘Could you tell me…’), which formally seems to require a yes or no answer. Finally, communication appears to have broken down completely between Dad and Daughter in (5), where Dad’s question receives no answer at all, Daughter choosing to close a door instead.

How can meaningful communication emerge from what seems to be chaotically disorganized interaction? And why is communication so often oblique, when more direct alternatives are available? (For example, if you want someone to close a door for you, as in (5), why not simply use the imperative verb form, designed specifically for this purpose, and say ‘Close the door!’?).

Conversational ‘short cuts’ of the kind illustrated above all ultimately serve to make interaction more efficient, by exploiting speakers’ shared knowledge and experience. They can only work because of a simple assumption that humans share in conversation, namely that they are engaged in a co-operative exercise. We will examine the consequences of this co-operative principle and look more closely at speech acts, in which language is used (as in (4) or (5)) not merely to communicate information but to achieve a particular purpose.

Co-operation generally prospers when participants in an interaction endeavour not to offend each other, i.e. they try to be polite. Later, we will consider a model of politeness developed by two linguists, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, and its consequences for our understanding of language in context. But we begin with the work of the philosopher Paul Grice, whose co-operative principle provides a framework for understanding many of the mysteries of conversation.