maxims

[Ellen F. Prince]

Of course I meant Maxim of QUANTITY below! Sorry.

>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.