Paul Grice’s (1975, 1989) CP theory seeks to describe how the hearer/reader understands the speaker’s/listener’s intended meaning. Grice defines CP as ‘Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged’ (Grice, 1975:
45; 1989: 26). He argues that the addresser can implicate something and the addressee should infer the intended meaning behind it. Thomas (1995: 56) states that Gricean theory aims to recognise ‘how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant, from the level of expressed meaning to the level of implied meaning.’
Gricean definition clarifies certain conversational principles that direct the flow of conversation and reveal expectations about an interaction process for both speakers and hearers, and if those expectations fail to be fulfilled, implicature will be drawn. Grice suggests ‘when people converse with one another they acknowledge a kind of tacit agreement to cooperate conversationally towards mutual ends’ (in Leech & Short, 2007: 236). The kind of implicature the reader draws, depends on which of the maxims is not followed. Grice maxims are:
Maxim of Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purpose of the exchange). Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
Maxim of Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Maxim of Relation: Be relevant.
Maxim of Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly.
Grice (1975: 45-46)
Occasionally, in the interaction between the addresser and the addressee, some maxims will be infringed, violated, or flouted, which can be defined as follows:
Infringing of a maxim describes a situation when speakers have no intention to create any conversational implicature. As Thomas (1995:74) explains, infringement occurs because of the inadequate command of the language that a speaker has or his
‘performance is impaired’ as a result of some cognitive impairment, or ‘nervousness, drunkenness, excitement’, or simply because ‘the speaker is constitutionally incapable of speaking clearly, to the point, etc.’.
Violating a maxim is 'unostentatious' non-observance of it, so that by breaking the maxim, the speaker 'will be liable to mislead' (Grice, 1975: 49); the speaker is aware of the violation, but the hearer is not. A violation of the maxim of Quality creates deception.
Flouting a maxim means that the speaker may blatantly fail to fulfil it. The hearer has to guess the extra meaning, regardless of the meaning of the items in the utterance; for instance, to flout a maxim of Quality signifies saying something that obviously implies something else.
Gricean theory has been criticised by several scholars: Leech (1983: 80) establishes PP to account for those phenomena that are not adequately grasped by CP and which cannot discuss ‘why people are often so indirect in conveying what they mean’. This implies that Gricean selected maxims and sub-maxims give no space to politeness maxims which are described by Leech (1983) with regard to principles (see Brown & Levinson, 1987:5). As Leech (1983: 82-83) suggests ‘in being polite one is often faced with a clash between the CP and the PP so that one has to choose how far to “trade off” one against the other’ and
‘blatantly [break] a maxim of the CP in order to uphold the PP’.
I agree that some of the maxims proposed by Grice fail to account for all situations.
For instance, the maxim of Quality informs us always to be truthful and leaves no spaces for telling white lies. When Grice postulates his maxims, and advocates the explicit following of these maxims, the variable of flexibility is lacking in certain cases, especially where the emotional needs of the hearer have to be considered. In such cases, the Quality maxim will clash with Leech’s (1983) Sympathy maxim. It should be taken into account that Gricean maxims are not prescriptions; they are explanations of how people manage to understand
each other. What they fail to do is to explain why people behave in certain ways, hence the need for politeness theories.
My analysis also shows that the weakness of Gricean maxims can be observed in the maxim of Quantity: being as ‘informative as required’, neither too much, nor too little, which is unclear since it creates a clash with Leech’s maxim of Tact that says ‘Minimize cost to other and Maximize benefit to other’. For instance, consider the two sentences:
Speaker A: Pass me the salt.
Speaker B: Could you pass me the salt please.
In regard to Gricean maxims, speaker A abides by the maxim of Quantity since it is informative and does not give too much or too little information, while the second sentence violates this maxim by following Leech’s maxim of Tact for the sake of politeness. Chapman (2005: 113) states that some researchers have critiqued Gricean theory due to its vagueness and ‘the lack of clarity over the justifications for, and divisions between, the maxims’.
Chapman also comments that Grice has also been accused of having ‘an idealistic view of human nature’ and attempting to provide etiquette rules for speakers. However, Chapman (2005: 113) defends Grice, saying that his aims were not to provide rules of conversation, but to identify ‘certain end-driven tendencies in interactive behaviour’ and describe how these contribute to conversation. According to Hadi (2013: 71), Gricean maxims are unable to account for the way people communicate in ‘sophisticated social contexts’. Davis (2000) states that the use of the notion ‘cooperation’ in Gricean CP, in comparison to the common meaning of this term, is considered to be one of the weaknesses.
Green (1996 in Hadi, 2013: 70) argues that ‘rationality and cooperativeness are characteristics common to all speakers in the world’. Green’s claim though possibly valid, can be disregarded in this thesis as the investigation does not deal with culturally specific issues: the two analysed characters investigated in this thesis share similar social norms and the authors of both novels are from western backgrounds.
Along with Gricean maxims, Neo-Griceans have also appeared. Levinson (2000 in Leech, 2014: 72) introduced the Q-principle ‘Do not say less than is required’, the I-principle
‘Do not say more than is required’ and the M-principle ‘Do not use a marked expression without reason’. According to Leech (2014: 72), Levinson’s principles are a ‘reworking of Gricean Maxims of Quantity and Manner’. Leech also asserts that Levinson pays less attention to the ‘Maxims of Quality and Relation’, which are important with respect to politeness.
In this thesis, Gricean maxims and sub-maxims are utilised since they offer a valuable insight into characters’ mind styles. These maxims have been formulated to draw the speaker’s implicatures and to show the way the hearers make inferences. In the selected chapters of the two novels, Christopher and Don can infringe and, on occasion, violate maxims because of their common features of pragmatic, social and ToM impairments, shared with individuals with HFA/AS who have little skill or a lack of skills to understand pragmatic inferences (Turkington & Anan, 2007: 9-10). Gricean maxims constitute one of the theoretical approaches of the category of interactional style given in the EMMS.
In the same way, Speech Act Theory, discussed in the next section, constitutes another theoretical approach used in the EMMS.