maxims and universality

Peter Harder harder at COCO.IHI.KU.DK
Mon Mar 1 08:57:43 UTC 1999


Dear funknetters -

Some weeks ago, when the issue was hot, I tried to send this message, which
was twice rejected for reasons unclear to the funknet administration, who
dis-and reconnected me in the hope of solving the problem. Excuse me for
foisting a dated message on you, but I'd kind of like to know if I am now
connected or not. --Peter
>
>It seems to me there are two issues involved in the discussion on Gricean
maxims. One is the status of 'something like' Grice's maxims where most
people, including myself, would agree with Ellen Prince that violations do
not bring about their falsification or cultural relativization. The other
issue, however, is the status of Grice's exact version, building on the
co-operative principle.
>
>I think Grice hovers between two interpretations, one being the above,
while the other is more like norms for efficient exchange of propositional
information (cf. Lyons's discussion, 1977:593), i.e. something like norms
for white, efficient males. To see the last interpretation, you need only
conjure up the picture of a person who never communicates more or less than
required for the purposes at hand, never says anything for which he lacks
adequate evidence, never strays into irrelevance etc. The ideal business
partner, but would you want your daughter to marry one?
>
>You can reject this by saying that nobody follows the norms all the time,
and as long as it triggers extra inferences (sabotage, implicature or
deficiency) when people deviate, the maxims are still valid. But as pointed
out by several people it is simply not true that all deviations from
Grice's maxims in their present shape do this. There are all sorts of
genres and cultural contexts where  purveying just the right amount of
high-quality information is beside the point - and where it would be
understood as sabotage, implicature or deficiency if people actually
behaved in a Gricean manner.
>
>I think the genuinely universal core of Grice's theory is that part of it
which is bound up with the degree of co-operation that is necessary to
communicate, i.e. to get messages across. That core needs to be filtered
out of the theory in its classic shape, in which it is assumed that there
is necessarily a co-operative contract beyond communication itself ('the
accepted purpose or direction of the talk'); here's where the Malagasy case
is a counterexample.
>
>Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson) is one attempt to formulate what such
a core could be, based on rigid cost-benefit assumptions about the nature
of communication...and, ahem, I have tried to formulate an alternative
where interactive success rather than informational optimization is basic
(cf. Functional Semantics (1996:136).
>
>                       --Peter Harder, Copenhagen



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