The cooperative principles

The cooperative principles

1. Those involved in communication assume that both parties will seek to cooperate with each other to establish agreed meaning.

2. There are four maxims:

   • Quality: Your contribution is true.
   • Quantity: Your contribution is as informative as required. No more, no less information.
   • Manner: You express yourself clearly and you are easily understood.
   • Relation: Your contribution is relevant

3. Paul Rice introduced this concept during the 20th Century.

4. Utterance interpretation involves:

   • Working out what the speaker means on the basis of the assumption that the utterance follows all the maxims.
   • Using inference rules.
   • Taking the meaning of the sentences together with contextual information.
   • Implicatures:
     • Conventional implicatures: Carried by a restricted number of words: but, even, therefore, yet.
     • Conversational implicatures: Found in the context of a conversation.

5. Speakers can produce implicatures in two ways:

   • Observance of the maxims
   • Non observance of the maxims.
     • Infringing: Always accidental; fail to provide information because of language inability, mistakes, etc.
     • Opting out: Intentional; refusing to provide information because of fear of harming someone, legal reasons, etc.
     • Violating: It's not meant to be noticed; direct lying, omitting relevant information, avoiding the question.
     • Flouting: It's meant to be noticed so that the hrarer infer an implicature.
     • Suspending: Culture or context may cause suspension of the maxims; not mentioning the name of the dead or the name of someone or something, etc.