maxims

[Mira Ariel]

Hi everyone,

I agree with Ellen Prince re the Gricean maxims. In order to show that
Grice (or other pragmatic theories such as Relevance theory) doesn't
work in a specific genre or community one needs to show that the
pragmatic theory is inapplicable to the case, or that it predicts a
different utterance/effect than we actually find. Violations which
create special implicatures are built into the Gricean theory, and do
NOT constitute counter-examples.

The way I interpret Och's important work is it shows that different
maxims are weighted differently, that politeness (another maxim perhaps)
has a different dress/application in different cultures, and that
different clashes arise in different cultures (taboos) which cause
speakeres to violate the maxims in different ways. There may indeed be
specific cultural, gender and other practices of WHAT the clashes are,
on HOW to weigh clashing maxims, but that does not invalidate the
general program, which embeds human conversations within rationality, I
believe.

However, a serious problem that I do see with these pragmatic theories
is in restricting them. The way I see it, you can rather easily explain
almost ANYTHING after the fact. But how to do that is more a
socio-psychological endeavor, I find.

Yours,

Mira Ariel