Grice’s work on the Cooperative Principle and the conversational maxims (1975) has been deeply influential for the development of pragmatics. As Thomas explains, ‘Grice’s theory is an attempt at explaining how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant, from the level of expressed meaning to the level of the implied meaning. ’ (1995: 56). I will provide here a short introduction to Grice’s theory which will be expanded in further chapters of the thesis, and applied to the analysis of characters’ language.
2.2.2.1 Implicature
When the meaning of a sentence is not restricted to the meaning of the words employed but an additional meaning is conveyed, we have an example of an implicature. If, when I hear the telephone ringing, I say ‘That is the telephone ringing!’. I may want my interlocutor to draw the implicature that I want him to answer the phone.
There are two types of implicatures. A conventional implicature is carried by the intrinsic meaning of some words like but, even, therefore, and yet (Levinson 1983: 127). For example, but carries the implicature that what comes next is unexpected. So in a sentence like ‘She was forty but beautiful’, but implicates that at that age, a woman is not usually beautiful (Thomas 1995: 57). On the other hand, a
conversational implicature does not depend on the meaning of words but on the particular context of usage of discourse, as it is explained in the following sections.
2.2.2.2 Cooperative Principle and conversational maxims
The Cooperative Principle was put forward by Grice (1975) to explain conversational implicature. His definition runs as follows:
Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction o f the talk exchange in which you are engaged. (1975: 45)
Grice’s definition points out that there are certain principles that guide conversations, setting expectations about interaction procedures on both speaker and hearer. Not following these expectations will bring about some kind of implicature and an additional meaning will be drawn. I consider that Grice’s theory shares some of the cognitive assumptions of schema theory in that it relies on expectations to infer further meanings. The kind of implicature the reader will draw depends on which of the maxims is not followed. The maxims are:
Maxim of Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purpose o f the exchange). Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
Maxim o f Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Maxim o f Relation: Be relevant.
M axim of Manner: Avoid obscurity o f expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly. (1975: 45-46)
The cognitive assumption about the participants expectations behind these maxims is captured by Antaki, who explains that:
For any utterance, the listener assumes that the speaker is abiding by the maxims and is saying something relevant, clear, informative and honest. Equally, the speaker knows that what he or she says will be treated by the listener as being relevant and so on. (...) The speaker can simply exploit the listener’s expectation that what is coming is a relevant explanation. (1994: 36)
2.2.2.3 Non-observance of the maxims
When somebody chooses not to observe a maxim, there are different ways of doing so.
Flouting a maxim
When speakers blatantly flout a maxim, they wish that the hearer look for another meaning, apart from the meaning of the utterance. That extra meaning is called the conversational implicature. Flouts can exploit all the maxims to achieve their implicature. For example, a flout to the maxim of quality involves saying something that is clearly not true, like in the case of irony; and a flout to the maxim of quantity would involve saying less than is necessary.
Violating a maxim
Grice defines the violation of a maxim as the ‘unostentatious’ non-observance of it, so that by breaking the maxim, the speaker ‘will be liable to mislead’ (1975: 49). In some activity types, like trials and politicians’ speech, maxim violation abounds. In those cases, speakers may be able to mislead their audiences without saying something that is ‘untrue’.
A speaker would opt out of a maxim when he does not want to cooperate with the conversation in the way the maxim requires. This takes place when, for example, in the public sphere, somebody cannot answer questions due to moral or legal reasons.
Infringing a maxim
The speaker who infringes a maxim does not intend the audience to draw any conversational implicature. This non-observance is simply due to imperfect linguistic performance. The source of this type of non-observance is attributed to Grice (1981) in Thomas (1995). She provides her own definition of an infringement:
this type o f non-observance could occur because the speaker has an imperfect command o f the language (a young child or a foreign learner), because the speaker’s performance is impaired in some way (nervousness, drunkenness, excitement), because o f some cognitive impairment, or simply because the speaker is constitutionally incapable o f speaking clearly, to the point, etc. (1995: 74)
In various parts of my thesis, I will demonstrate the special relevancy of this type of non-observance for my research on mind style. I will show how the infringement of maxims may reveal characters’ self-concepts and, more particularly, their cognitive conditions, both to readers and to other characters interacting with them. In the case of conversations between characters, I will demonstrate how the conversational behaviour of mentally ill characters failing to observe maxims constitutes a source of self-presentation behaviour for other characters to draw inferences about them. Similarly, readers will be able to draw inferences about characters’ mind styles from their infringement of maxims both in their conversations with other characters and in their roles as characters-narrators, in their narrations. I will also claim that the infringement of maxims by characters could be seen as a flout of the maxim at the
author-audience level, because the author flouts the maxim so that we draw an implicature about the character.
Suspending a maxim
A maxim is suspended when there are no expectations that the maxim will be fulfilled and therefore, no implicature will be drawn. This last non-observance type was offered by some authors (see Thomas 1995: 72, 76-78) to account for culture-specific cases or particular events that were not accounted for with the other maxims. For example, at funeral prayers, only the good qualities of the deceased will be mentioned, even though everybody may know the negative qualities of the person, thus suspending the maxim of quantity.
Grice’s theory offers an interesting framework to analyse the speech style of characters in narrative texts. What maxims characters fail to observe and what kind of non-observance they make use of will disclose aspects of their identities and ways of conceptualising the world. I will return to these issues at several stages in my thesis.