Information About

Gricean Maxim
  CATEGORIES ABOUT GRICEAN MAXIMS
   
pragmatics
   
SHOPPER'S DELIGHT
 
Shop For:  
Department
Price Minimum:
Price Maximum:
      



Maxim of Quality: Truth
  • Do not say what you believe to be false.

  • Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.


Maxim of Quantity: Information
  • 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.


Maxim of Relation: Relevance
  • Be relevant.


Maxim of Manner: Clarity
  • Avoid obscurity of expression.

  • Avoid ambiguity.

  • Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).

  • Be orderly.


These maxims may be better understood as describing the assumptions listeners normally make about the way speakers will talk, rather than prescriptions for how one ought to talk. Linguist Kent Bach writes:

: ... {Link without Title} e need first to get clear on the character of Grice’s maxims. They are not sociological generalizations about speech, nor they are moral prescriptions or proscriptions on what to say or communicate. Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit. (Bach 2005).

If the overt, surface meaning of a sentence does not seem to be consistent with the Gricean maxims, and yet the circumstances lead us to think that the speaker is nonetheless obeying the Cooperative Principle , we tend to look for other meanings that could be Implicated by the sentence.


SEE ALSO




EXTERNAL LINKS