Grice's Cooperative Principle Analysis

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This paper aims to examine the understanding of violation of Gricean maxim of Cooperative Principles by children and adults of age 15 to 60 years and show that their understanding depends on identifying and accessing relevant contextual information. They did differ in gender, education, social and economic background. Their implicit understanding of maxim of quality, quantity, relation and manner were accessed through a survey which consisted of answering to questions based on flouting conversations purposely meant to miscommunicate with the social meaning. The findings of this survey are documented in this paper and it is sure to contribute to the existing knowledge in the area of pragmatics in linguistic theories. Pragmatics is the study …show more content…

In 1975, Philosopher H. Paul Grice introduced the Cooperative Principle and explained conversational implicature in his article, “Logic and Conversation”. The term “cooperation” is often confused with its general meaning of the word. Grice (1975) developed the following …show more content…

There are some situations where these maxims are flouted; for instance, while telling a joke, while trying to surprise someone or while making a sarcastic comment and so on. An implicature refers to an additional meaning that is intended by the speaker and generated by the listener. Hence it is the speaker who communicates meaning through implicature and it is the listener who interprets the meaning through inference. Even though the speaker violates the maxims of Cooperative Principle, he still is thought to be cooperative. Traditional researchers who work on Grice Cooperative Principle aim to criticize the practicability of these maxims, yet a research on understanding the sensitivity to the violation of these maxims is to be done. This paper opens out that the main challenge for inferring the meaning of the conversation is in identifying and accessing relevant contextual information. In this paper, I incorporate evidence from several implicatures of violation of Gricean maxim of Cooperative principles to understand that both children and adults are able to accomplish complex pragmatic inferences comparatively in an efficient way, and at the same time, encounter some difficulty in finding what is relevant in