Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 911

www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

To Grice or not to Grice

(A few words to go with this Focus-on Issue)

The towering gure of Herbert Paul Grice continues to exert its inuence even
several decades after the original publications that made him rightly famous.
Today, some even talk about a Neo-Gricean trend in current linguistic research,
comprising such areas as as the nature of reference and deixis, relevance, as well as
more fundamental questions concerning the validity and usefulness of the Gricean
maxims from a pragmatic point of view and their linguistic and philosophical
background.
The articles gathered in the present collection all in some way take issue with
Gricean themes. Without going into details and naming individuals (always a risky
business), let me broadly state that the reader will encounter both classical Gricean
research patterns and those that are less than standard, sometimes even running
counter to what some have deemed to be Gricean orthodoxy.
Personally, I am not in favor of establishing schools or doxas; therefore, the term
(Neo-)Gricean (along with such labels as Post-, or even Non-Gricean) should be
taken with all possible reservation. The important thing is that in this issue, we
observe a living testimony to, and a fruitful elaboration of, some of the ideas that
shook the world of language studies in the past century, and continue to move and
inspire todays research.

Jacob L. Mey
Brasilia, D.F., April 29, 2002

0378-2166/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.

PII: S0378-2166(02)00064-4