maxims

Ellen F. Prince ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU
Wed Feb 10 17:22:39 UTC 1999


George Lakoff <lakoff at COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU> writes:

>At 3:13 PM -0800 2/9/99, OLGA at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU wrote:
>>Dear Marta Carretero,
>>Gricean maxims are regularly violated in informal phatic discourse by
>>those who perceive their interlocutors to be close to them. They also
>>seem to be at least in part gender/culture-conditioned, as they reflect
>>primarily European male discourse.
>>Olga Yokoyama
>
>Eleanor Ochs noted, starting back in the early 70's, that Gricean maxims
>are not universal and are different in Samoan. Many linguists travelling to
>Mexico have noticed that they are different there too. And Robin Lakoff (in
>Language and Woman's Place) observed in 1974 that differences in the
>pragmatics of politeness between men and women led to different maxims, a
>fact that has been discussed in the works of Deborah Tannen since then.

Could we get a reference, George? The paper I recall by Elinor (then)
Keenan appeared in Language in Society and concerned Malagasy, not
Samoan. In fact, she claimed but did not show that Gricean maxims are
different in Malagasy. In particular, IIRC, she gave an example like
the following as a typical Malagasy exchange and took it to be
evidence of a lack of Maxim of Quality:

        A: How do you open the door?
        B: If you don't open it from the inside, it won't open.

Of course, she TAKES FOR GRANTED that A infers from B's response that,
if you do open it from the inside, it will open. But this is PRECISELY
the sort of non-logical inference that Grice is attempting to account
for with his Maxims! (In fact, it's what Geis and Zwicky had already
discussed and named 'invited inference', IIRC.) For a Gricean account
of how this inference could be accounted for in a Gazdar-type model,
see my old paper 'Grice and universality: a reappraisal', downloadable
as a postscript file from http://babel.ling.upenn.edu/~ellen.

The problem that keeps coming up over the years is that some read
Grice as tho he were an ethnographer describing society rather than as
a philosopher laying the groundwork for a theory of how people draw
predictable inferences that are not logically entailed by what is said.



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