conversational implicature

[Mick Perkins]

Dear Marta

The conversation of people with communication impairments can often be
characterised as violating Grice's maxims. For example people with aphasia
could be said to be violating the maxim of quantity to the extent that they
are unable to linguistically encode all that they want to, and also people
on the autistic spectrum either often say too little or too much because
they are unable to accurately judge the communicative needs of their
interlocutor. In the latter case, though, one might argue that from the
speaker's perspective they are saying EXACTLY the right amount to be
appropriately informative according to their reading (albeit atypical) of
the situation. For more discussion of such issues and illustrative material
from a range of communication impairments including fluent and nonfluent
aphasia, 'semantic-pragmatic' disorder, autism, traumatic brain injury,
right hemisphere brain damage and schizophrenia, you could check out the
following article:

Perkins, M. R. (1998) Is pragmatics epiphenomenal? Evidence from
communication disorders. Journal of Pragmatics  29: 291-311.

Mick Perkins



>        Dear funknetters,
>
>        I would be grateful if some of you gave me some references on
>genres/text types/other cases in which the Gricean Cooperative Principle
>and Maxims are not followed or
>expected to be followed to a large extent (for example: trials, political
>interviews, etc.) I would especially like works which use authentic spoken
>or written English material, so as to show examples to my students of
>Pragmatics.
>
>        Thanks in advance.
>
>        Best wishes,
>
>        Marta.