Jul. 2007, Volume 4, No.7 (Serial No.

43) Sino-US English Teaching, ISSN1539-8072, USA

Grice’s theory of conversational implicature

QU Li-juan
(Department of Foreign Languages, Basic Medical Science College, Harbin Medical University, Harbin 150081, China)

Abstract: Understanding an utterance is far from proposition analysis and literal meaning interpretation. It is
the unity of what is said and what is implicated. Grice’s theory of conversational implicature provides some
explicit account of how it is possible to mean more than what is literally expressed by the conventional sense of
the linguistic expressions uttered. Using this theory, we can infer the speaker’s real attention, appreciate figure of
speech in literary work, and improve our communicative competence.
Key words: conversational implicature; inference; co-operative maxims; figure of speech

1. Introduction

Grice’s distinction between sentence-meaning and speaker-meaning has noticed the discrepancies between
context-independent literal meaning and context-determinate conversational implicature. For example, “He is a
fine friend” said ironically may be intended by the speaker to communicate the contradictory meaning “He is a
bad friend”. The details of what is implicated will depend upon the particular context of utterance.
Therefore, understanding an utterance involves a great deal more than knowing the meanings of the words
uttered and the grammatical relations between them. It often requires a certain degree of implicitness in
communication. How then is the full communicative intention, or we say, the conversational implicature, to be
recognized? Grice’s co-operative principle provides some clues to the mechanism of recognition.

2. Grice’s Theory of Conversational Implicature

2.1 Grice’s co-operative principle

Paul Grice, an American language philosopher, proposes that in ordinary conversation, speakers and hearers
share a co-operative principle. He identifies as guidelines of four basic maxims of conversation or general
principles underlying the efficient co-operative use of language, which jointly express a general co-operative
principle. These principles are expressed as follows:
The co-operative principle
Make your 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.
The maxim of Quality
Try to make your contribution one that is true, specifically:
(1) Do not say what you believe to be false
(2) Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence
The maxim of Quantity

QU Li-juan, M.A., lecturer of Department of Foreign Languages, Basic Medical Science College, Harbin Medical University;
research field: linguistics.

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(1) Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange
(2) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required
The maxim of Relevance
Make your contributions relevant
The maxim of Manner
Be perspicuous, and specifically:
(1) Avoid obscurity
(2) Avoid ambiguity
(3) Be brief
(4) Be orderly
2.2 Conversational implicature
Grice does not of course prescribe the use of such maxims. Nor does he suggest that we use them to construct
conversations. But they are useful for analyzing and interpreting conversation, and may generate inferences
beyond the semantic content of the sentences uttered. Conversational implicature may be generated by the maxims
which the speaker deliberately and ostentatiously breaches or flouts.
The flouting or exploitation of the maxims may be aroused by
(1) The speaker’s clear declaration, e.g. “No comment” or “Don’t talk”.
(2) The speaker’s secret violation which sometimes misleads the hearer, such as lying.
(3) The speaker’s observation of one maxim at the expense of another, e.g. “I know somebody there”. Here
the speaker observes the maxim of Quality, but violates the maxim of Quantity.
(4) The speaker’s conveying of conversational implicature.
The fourth one is the real interest. The inferences of the speaker’s conversational implicature are based on the
remarkable robustness of the assumption of co-operation: if someone drastically and dramatically deviates from
maxim-type behavior, then his utterances are still read as underlyingly co-operative if this is at all possible. In this
way, the surface flouting of the co-operative maxims give us a clue or hint to infer the conversational implicature,
and can be seen to give rise to many of the traditional ‘figure of speech’. Some details follow.
2.2.1 Quality
“I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.”
She (Daisy) laughed again, as if she said something very witty…. (from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The great
Gatsby)
Here, by overtly violating the first maxim of Quality (do not say what you believe to be false), as a normal
person can hardly be paralyzed with happiness, we can infer from the hyperbole that Daisy is very happy. And
from the way she speaks, we can get one aspect of Daisy’s characteristics.
“Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir.” (from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The great Gatsby)
From the metonymy, it is safe to infer the conversational implicature “Someone from Philadelphia wants you
on the phone” instead that a lifeless place wants whatever.
“Don’t bring Tom.”
“Who is ‘Tom’?” she (Daisy) asked innocently. (from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The great Gatsby)
Tom is Daisy’s husband, but Daisy innocently asked who he is. The addressee safely gets the promise from
Daisy that she’ll go to the date alone. Therefore, by overtly violating the sincerity of a question, once again an
implicature is generated by a flouting of the maxim of Quality.

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As fair art thou, my bonnie lass.

So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear.
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run. (from Robert Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose” )
By violating the second maxim of Quality (do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence), the great
Scottish poet implicates that his love will last forever.
In 1979, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher was elected as the first woman Prime Minister in Britain. She was called
the “Iron Lady”.
The straightforward interpretation is that since Mrs. Margaret Thatcher in fact lacked the definitional
properties of iron, she merely had some of the incidental properties like hardness, resilience, non-flexibility or
durability. Which particular set of such properties are attributed to her are at least in part dependent on the
contexts of utterance: said by an admirer it may be a commendation, conveying the properties of toughness and
resilience; said by a detractor, it may be taken as a denigration, conveying her lack of flexibility, emotional
impassivity or belligerence. Though the explanation of metaphor is rather complex, its recognition helps to reveal
its implicature.
John Keats writes in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter ….
These two lines, by forming a paradox, reveal the human psychology that what one imagines is more desirable
than what he has.
2.2.2 Quantity
I (Nick) told her (Daisy) how I had stopped in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen
people had sent their love through me.
“Do they miss me?” she cried ecstatically.
“The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and
there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore.” (from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The great Gatsby)
According to the second maxim of Quantity (do not make your contribution more informative than is required),
one word “Yes” is enough to answer Daisy’s question. But by flouting the maxim of Quantity, as well as of
Quality, Nick satisfies Daisy’s vanity with his redundancy and hyperbole.
2.2.3 Relevance
A: I really cannot endure anymore. The work is so hard, and the salary is so pity. Do you agree?
B: Huh, I saw your program yesterday, and I suggest some improvements here and there.
Here B’s utterance might implicate in the appropriate circumstances “Hey, watch out, the boss is standing
right behind you”.
2.2.4 Manner
“I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do….”
“Nor that isn’t good for me,” she said. “I know. Could we have another beer?”

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“All right. But you’ve got to realize….”

“I realize,” the girl said. “Can’t we maybe stop talking?”
They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man
looked at her and at the table.
“You’ve got to realize,” he said, “that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to
go through with it if it means anything to you.” (from Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants)
The violation of the sub-maxim “be brief” implicates the opposite meaning of the underlined utterance. If the
man really doesn’t want the girl to do anything that she doesn’t want to do, he mentions it once is enough. But he
persists on mentioning it once again even after he is interrupted on purpose, which actually means that he does
want the girl to do it (abortion) though she doesn’t want to. Thus the irony is revealed.
“Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” (from Ernest Hemingway’s Hills
like white elephants)
The successive seven please implicates that the girl cannot bear the boy’s persuasion of abortion any longer.

3. Conclusion

Many anomalous or contradictory sentences that could not be interpreted by truth-value semanticists, may be
perfectly well-formed literary creations. A variety of phenomena that are troublesome from the viewpoint of
formal semantics, such as the assertion of tautologies and contradictions, indirect speech acts, metaphorical
interpretation and many other figures of speech, has found their explanatory potential in Grice’s theory on
conversational implicatures. As the broad sense of meaning should include the ironic, metaphoric and implicit
communicative content of an utterance, it cannot be restricted to the conventional content of what is said. Grice’s
work enables us to calculate, or compute the intended meaning of the utterance as a function of its literal meaning
and of the context in which it is uttered. “The context-dependent calculability (or computability) of conversational
implicatures—their calculability being probabilistic, or heuristic, rather than algorithmic, or deterministic—is
generally taken to be one of their defining properties” (Lyons, 1995).
It should also be mentioned that though Grice provides us with principles to recognize the implicated and
intended meaning, they are far from guiding addressees in their search for one inference rather than another.
Especially the account of metaphor must rely on features of our general ability to reason analogically with the
help of psychological interpretation. Nevertheless, at least, Grice’s maxims succeed in the first step—recognition
and calculation.

References:
Levinson, S. C. 2003. Pragmatics. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press & Cambridge University Press.
Lyons, J. 2000. Linguistic semantics: An introduction. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press & Cambridge
University Press.
Saeed, J. I. 2000. Semantics. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press & Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
SHAO Jin-di & BAI Jin-peng. 2002. Introduction to literature. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.

(Edited by Stella and Doris)

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