maxims

[Jan.Nuyts]

> 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
> ...
> 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.
Maybe this is saying the same thing as in Mira's last paragraph, but: what
would constitute a counterexample to the Gricean theory? Or in other
words, is this theory refutable?
On the other hand, one may wonder whether the 'classical' requirement for
a theory to be refutable in order to be a real theory at all (instead of a
dogma) is maintainable. In the (usually - or always? - fictive) situation
in which a theory optimally accounts for the set of facts it is meant to
explain, it should be impossible to come up with counterexamples, or
even to conceive of counterexamples ...

Jan
                               *****
Jan Nuyts                                       phone: 32/3/820.27.73
University of Antwerp                           fax: 32/3/820.27.62
Linguistics                                     email: nuyts at uia.ua.ac.be
Universiteitsplein 1
B-2610 Wilrijk - Belgium