Grice’s theory of implicature

Much of Grice’s work explores different kinds of meaning, and in particular the difference between what a speaker says and what he/she implicates. What Grice termed implicatures go beyond what is actually said: for example in (5) above, what appears to be a question about a person’s birthplace is interpreted (correctly) by the hearer as meaning ‘close the door’. Implicatures can be inferred from a general principle of conversation, which he set out as follows:

The co-operative principle

‘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’.

The principle can be broken down into four maxims of conversation (though Grice suggested that this might not be an exhaustive list):

1 The maxim of quality

Try to make your contribution one that is true, specifically:

do not say what you believe to be false

do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

2 The maxim of quantity

Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.

Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

3 The maxim of relevance (or relation)

Make your contributions relevant.

4 The maxim of manner

Be perspicuous, and specifically:

avoid obscurity

avoid ambiguity

be brief

be orderly.

It is important to understand what the principle and its maxims are and, equally importantly, what they are not. They are not rules, like grammatical rules: it is possible to violate them – sometimes deliberately and ostentatiously so – and our utterance (the term employed to signify a spoken contribution in context) will still be understood. Nor are they social imperatives of the ‘don’t forget to say please and thank you’ kind, though they are a kind of social convention which we unconsciously acquire as we learn to use language.

What the principle and maxims amount to is a very robust set of assumptions that participants make about the conversation in which they are engaged, which are often maintained even in the face of evidence that co-operation has broken down. So even where, for example, a speaker’s contribution to an interaction appears irrelevant, a hearer will generally assume that it was intended as relevant, and strive to find an interpretation which fits the purposes of the current exchange. Similarly, it hardly needs saying that speakers do not always speak the truth as the maxim of quality requires, but conversation nonetheless proceeds on the assumption that contributions are truthful, unless and until that assumption becomes untenable.