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Paul Grice and Conversational Implicature

Paul Grice was a philosopher born in Birmingham, England in 1913 who studied conversational implicature. He noted that people infer meanings from how something is said rather than just the literal words. Grice analyzed this phenomenon and proposed the Cooperative Principle of making contributions according to the accepted purpose of a conversation. He outlined four categories with more specific maxims for Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner.

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139 views1 page

Paul Grice and Conversational Implicature

Paul Grice was a philosopher born in Birmingham, England in 1913 who studied conversational implicature. He noted that people infer meanings from how something is said rather than just the literal words. Grice analyzed this phenomenon and proposed the Cooperative Principle of making contributions according to the accepted purpose of a conversation. He outlined four categories with more specific maxims for Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner.

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Lily Rotta
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Paul grice

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Herbert Paul Grice, universally known as Paul, was born on March 13, 1913 in Birmingham, England and
died on August 28, 1988 in Berkeley CA

Conversational implicature
Conversational implicatures are, roughly, things that a hearer can work out from
the way something was said rather than what was said.
People process conversational implicatures all of the time and are mostly unaware of
it. For example, if someone asks “Could you close the door?” the hearer does not
usually answer “Yes”, instead they perform the non-linguistic act of closing the
door. In this case, although the speaker used a form of words that is conventionally a
question, the hearer can infer that the speaker is making a request.
Grice was the first to note this ubiquitous feature of language use and also the first to
present a philosophical analysis. He begins by noting that conversations are usually
to some degree cooperative enterprises.
He then formulates the Cooperative Principle: “Make your conversational
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” (1989, 26).
At a more detailed level, he distinguishes four categories with more specific
maxims.
The category of Quantity includes two injunctions, one to make your contribution
as informative as is required, and the second to make it no more informative than is
required.
The category of Quality is governed by a supermaxim: “Try to make your
contribution one that is true”. tell the truth
The category of Relation has a single maxim, “Be relevant”.
The category of Manner has a short “super” maxim “Be perspicuous”.

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