Linguistics An Essential Introduction (Version 1.5)

Even though Zoe has not said so, Noah will likely interpret her answer to mean that she did not take Laika for a walk. But how would he arrive at this conclusion? Noah’s reasoning could be something like this (although of course, it would be subconscious and very fast):

Linguists call what Zoe is doing in (1) ‘creating an implicature’ and what Noah is doing in the steps outlined her ‘making an inference’. As discussed in Section 9.1, implicatures — unlike entailments — can be cancelled, and — unlike presuppositions — they must not be true for a sentence to be true or false.

This way of analysing how implicatures arise in discourse was first proposed by the British philosopher Paul Grice (1913–1988). He suggested that there are implicit conversational principles that discourse participants follow in order to cooperate in accomplishing conversational goals. For example, let’s say that the topic of discussion was “How much money should we spend on Laika’s birthday party?”. If everyone in the conversation agrees that the goal is to figure out a reasonable cost for the party, then all discourse participants assume that everyone in the conversation is acting in a reasonable way and uttering things in order to accomplish this goal. Grice called this the Cooperative Principle, and described it as encompassing four rules that he called maxims:

The idea is that if these are the conversational rules that people follow (and if people assume that other people follow these rules too), then there is an explanation of why certain implicatures arise in discourse. Note that while they are stated as imperatives (e.g., “do this!”, “don’t do that!”), these maxims should not be understood as prescriptive “do’s” and “don’ts”, but as a way of capturing what language users do subconsciously when using language. It’s similar to how phonological rules can be stated like “turn voiceless consonants into voiced consonants!” or “don’t voice the consonant if you already have a voiced obstruent in the morpheme!”.

We saw two of the maxims at work in example (1): the maxim of truth quality and the maxim of quantity — it is only by assuming a) that Zoe is truthful and b) that Zoe will try to be as informative as possible, that Noah will arrive at the inference that Zoe did not take Laika for a walk. We will look at more examples in a moment, but there are two general points we must discuss before we do so.

First, Speakers follow the maxims of the Cooperative Principle subconsciously under normal circumstances, but they are free to violate them, and they will do so if they do not feel cooperative. For example, if Zoe forgot to feed and walk Laika, but does not want Noah to know this, she could simply violate the maxim of quality — in other words, she could lie:

In this case, Zoe is relying on Noah’s assumption that she is following the Cooperative Principle, and will not give him any indication that she is not — the point of lying is usually that you want to deceive the person you are talking to.

Second, Speakers sometimes violate the maxims of the Conversational Principle openly, i.e., in a way that makes it clear to the Hearer that the principle is violated. To distinguish this from the secret violations, linguists call this flouting a maxim (flout means ‘to openly disregard a rule’).

Why should Speakers do this? Imagine that Noah drops by Zoe’s apartment and asks her to look after his dog for half an hour so that he can go to the hairdresser’s. When he returns, the following conversation ensues:

Again, Zoe’s answer is not in accordance with the maxim of quality — she did not do any of the things she claims to have done. She is lying, but she is doing so in a way that makes it clear to Noah that she is doing so. Noah’s inference process takes this into account — he recognizes that Zoe wants him to understand she is lying and will look for a reason. If he is smart, he will understand that what Zoe is telling him is that it is not her job to do these things and that she would not have had enough time to do them anyway.

Let us briefly look a little bit closer at the other three maxims, beginning with the maxim of quantity. We already saw it at play in example (1), but here is another example. Let us say Zoe agrees to feed Laika while Noah is away, she might ask the question in (4). Some possible answers by Noah are shown in (4a) through (4c):

In (4a), Noah is obeying the maxim of quantity, giving just the right amount of information. In (4b), he is violating the maxim, giving more information than necessary, because thinking about the cupboard triggers a memory that he shares without any particular purpose in mind. In (4c) he is flouting the maxim — he must know that Zoe is not asking about the container holding the dog food, but about the location of the container. His intent in flouting the maxim could be a humorous one — he might just want to make a silly joke —, or he could be communicating to Zoe that her question is dumb because it should be obvious to her where he keeps his dog food.

Let us look at the maxim of manner next. Imagine that, in March 2020, Zoe and Aylin are faced with a discussion of how to properly wash one’s hands. Aylin has been checking the guidelines from the CDC and the following conversation ensues:

Aylin’s answer is truthful, and it contains the right amount of information, but it is not a good answer — it violates the principle that contributions to the discourse should be as clear, brief, and orderly as possible. In order to comply with this maxim, the answer would have to look more like this:

Finally, let us look at the maxim of relation, which states that you should make your contributions to the conversation relevant to what is being discussed. Look at the following conversation:

This is a perfectly normal and cooperative conversation, because Aylin brought up the topic of what things they did in their childhood. Noah responds with something that is related to this topic: what he did as a child, which in this case is take swimming classes. The maxim of relation is being followed.

Contrast this with Noah’s reply in (8), which for many people will probably be a slightly more surprising turn in the conversation.

Assuming that Noah is not lying, he has said something truthful, and is following the maxim of quality. We don’t get the sense that he is oversharing or undersharing, and he has at least said something about his childhood, which is to some extent informative — so quantity doesn’t seem like the main maxim being violated either. The contribution is brief and orderly — so manner is fine, too. The main reason that (8) might feel odd to some adult English users is because Noah is off topic. The topic under discussion is “what extracurricular activities did you do as a child”, so to stay on topic you would minimally name events, not stative properties like what your favourite food was. This in this context would be a violation of the maxim of relation. However, given that there does not seem to be any way that Noah could be confused about the topic of the conversation, Aylin might also assume that Noah is deliberately flouting the maxim of relation — he might be saying that he did not have any extracurricular activities, or that he thinks that children should not do any extracurricular activities, but instead be free to just follow their own impulses.

CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. Adapted from Catherine Anderson, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders, and Ai Taniguchi, adaptations and addtions by Anatol Stefanowitsch.