The Cooperative Theory

The Cooperative Theory

1. Proposed by Grice 1975

   • Required contributions by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

2. Four Maxims

   • Quantity
     • Contributions as informative as is required
   • Quality
     • Do not say what you believe to be false
   • Relation
     • Be relevant
   • Manner
     • Avoid obscurity of expression, be brief and be orderly

3. Utterance Interpretation

   • Conceptual Information
   • Using inference rules
   • What the speaker means on the basis of the assumption
     • Pragmatic explanations

4. Conversational Implicatures

   • Meaning
     • Semantic meaning
     • Intended meaning
       • Unconventional meaning
         • Generalised/scalar
       • Convencional meaning

5. The flouting of cooperative principles

   • Inferences
     • Preserve the assumption of the cooperation
     • Conversational implicatures

6. Breaking the maxims

   • Violate
     • We break the maxims surreptitiously, or covertly, so that other people do not know

7. Infringing Maxims

   • Maxim infringement occurs when a Speaker fails to observe the maxim, although s/he has no intention of generating an implicature and no intention of deceiving.

8. Opting out of a maxim

   • A Speaker opts out of observing a maxim whenever s/he indicates unwillingness to cooperate in the way the maxim require

9. Suspending a maxim

   • There is no expectation on the part of any participant that one or several maxims should be observed.