COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE , GRICE'S MAXIMS, CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES

1. GRICE’S
COOPERATIVE
PRINCIPLE
AND
CONVERSATIONAL
IMPLICATURE
Ahmed Qadoury Abed
Ph D Candidate
Baghdad University
College of Arts
English Department
2012-2013
1

2. THE PRINCIPLE ITSELF
 In his William James Lectures at Harvard
University in 1967, H. Paul Grice posited a
general set of rules contributors to ordinary
conversation were generally expected to follow.
He named it the Cooperative Principle (CP), and
formulated it as follows:
 Make your conversational contribution such as is
required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the
accepted purpose or direction of the talk
exchange in which you are engaged (Grice, 1989:
26).
2

3. CP :IS AN IDEALISTIC
REPRESENTATION?
 At first glance, the Cooperative Principle may
appear an idealistic representation of actual
human communication. After all, as Grice himself
has learned from his detractors, many believe ‘‘. .
. even in the talk-exchanges of civilized people
browbeating disputation and conversational sharp
practices are far too common to be offenses
against the fundamental dictates of
conversational practice.’’ Further, even if one
discounts the tone of an exchange, ‘‘much of our
talk exchange is too haphazard to be directed
toward an end cooperative or otherwise’’ (Grice,
1989: 369).
3

4. GRICE’S INTENTION
 Grice has never intended his use of the
word ‘cooperation’ to indicate an ideal
view of communication. Rather, Grice was
trying to describe how it happens that –
despite the haphazard or even agonistic
nature of much ordinary human
communication – most discourse
participants are quite capable of making
themselves understood and capable of
understanding most others in the course
of their daily business.
4

5. WHAT COUNTS AS
COOPERATION?
 Grice invites us to consider the following, quite
unextraordinary exchange:
 A: I am out of petrol.
 B: There is a garage round the corner (Grice, 1989: 32).
 Assuming A immediately proceeds to the garage, secures
the petrol, and refills his car, we may describe B’s
contribution as having been successful. By what rational
process of thought was A so quickly able to come to the
conclusion that the garage to which B refers would fulfill his
need for petrol? Why did B’s utterance work? Grice’s
answer: because A and B adhere to the Cooperative
Principle of Discourse. It is not hard to imagine that two
friends sharing a ride would want to help each other
through a minor crisis; thus, ‘cooperation’ in this scenario
seems quite apt.
5

6. ANOTHER WAY OF
COOPERATION
 But imagine the exchange went this way instead:
 A: I am out of petrol.
 B: (sarcastically) How nice that you pay such close
attention to important details.
 In this second scenario, not only does B refuse to
assist A in solving the problem, he uses the
occasion to add to A’s conundrum an assault
upon his character. Assuming A feels the sting;
again B’s contribution has been successful. So
how and why in this case has B’s contribution
worked? How can such a sour response as B’s
callous retort be considered ‘cooperative’?
 Again, Grice’s Cooperative Principle proves a
useful answer. The explanation requires closer
inspection of the strictness with which Grice uses
the term.
6

7. GRICE’S LIMIT OF CP
APPLICATION
 Grice finds that most talk exchanges do
follow the CP because most talk
exchanges do, in fact, exhibit the
cooperative characteristics he outlines:
 Our talk exchanges . . are
characteristically, to some degree at
least, cooperative efforts; and each
participant recognizes in them, to
some extent, a common purpose or
set of purposes, or at least a mutually
accepted direction (Grice, 1989: 26).
7

8. Grice’s Types of Meanings
What is meant
What is said What is implicated
Conventionally Non-conventionally
Conversationally
Generally Particularly
Non-conversationally
8

9. CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
 According to Grice, utterance interpretation is not a matter
of decoding messages, but rather involves
(1) taking the meaning of the sentences together with
contextual information,
(2) using inference rules
(3) working out what the speaker means on the basis of the
assumption that the utterance conforms to the maxims.
The main advantage of this approach from Grice’s point of
view is that it provides a pragmatic explanation for a wide
range of phenomena, especially for conversational
implicauture is--- a kind of extra meaning that is not
literally contained in the utterance.
An implicature is a piece of information that is conveyed
indirectly by an utterance. It is neither a part nor a
necessary consequence of the utterance.
9

10. GRICE’S MAXIMS
 Grice identified the Cooperative Principle as a ‘ super
principle’ or a ‘supreme principle’ (1989: 368f) that he
generalized from four conversational ‘maxims’ he claimed
discourse participants ordinarily follow. Grice(1989: 28)
identifies the maxims as:
1. The Maxim of Quality
 Try to make your contribution one that is true:
 A. Do not say what you believe to be false.
 B. Do not say that for which you lack adequate
evidence (Say what you believe to be true)
 2. The Maxim of Quantity
 A. make your contribution as informative as is
required (for the current purpose of the exchange)
 B. Do not make your contribution more informative
than is required
10

11. 3- The Maxim of Relation
 Be relevant
4-The Maxim of Manner
 A. Be perspicuous:.
 B. Avoid obscurity of expression.
 C. Avoid ambiguity.
 D. Be brief (avoid unnecessary
prolixity).
 F. Be orderly
11

12. Clear fulfillment of these maxims may be
demonstrated in the following exchange:
 Husband: Where are the car keys?
 Wife: They ‘re on the table in the hall.
The wife has answered clearly (manner) and
truthfully (Quality), has given just the right
amount of information (Quantity) and has directly
addressed her husband’s goal in asking the
question (Relation). She ahs said precisely what
she meant, no more and no less.
 But Grice knew that people do not always follows
these maxims as they communicate ;”What dull
business conversation analysis would be if they
did!” Rather, interlocutors can fail to fulfill the
maxims in a variety of ways, some mundane,
some inadvertent, but others lead to what most
consider the most powerful aspect of Grice’s CP:
conversational ‘implicature.’ 12

13. Quality implicature
-John has two PhDs.
+<I believe John has two PhDs,and have adequate evidence that he has.
Quantity Implicature
-Nigel has fourteen children.
+<Nigel has no more than fourteen children.
Relation Implicature
-A: Can you tell me the time?
-B: Well, the milkman has come.
+>The time now is after the time the milkman arrived.
Manner Implicature
-A: How do I get into your apartment?
-B: Walk up to the front door, turn the door handle clockwise as far as it will
go, and then pull gently towards you.
+>Pay particular attention and care to each step of the instructions I’ve given
you.
- John is a tiger.
- His wife has wooden ears.
13

14. FAILURE OF MAXIMS AND
IMPLICATURES
 Grice describes four ways in which maxims may
go unfulfilled in ordinary conversation.
1-infringing
2-Opting out
3-suspending
4-flouting
 The first three ways are fairly straight forward.
One might violate or infringe a maxim. This
infringement is often done with the intention of
misleading; for example, one might say, ‘Patricia
was with a man last night’ as a way of making
Patricia’s routine dinner out with her husband
seem clandestine.
14

15. Maxim infringement
 Maxim infringement occurs when a Speaker fails to observe the maxim, although s/he has
no intention of generating an implicature and no intention of deceiving. Generally
infringing stems from imperfect linguistic performance (in the case of a young child or a
foreigner) or from impaired linguistic performance brought about by nervousness,
drunkenness, excitement, disability.
 –Rachel: Yeah, and also we need more umm, drinks. Hold on a second. (Gets up but stumbles
a little bit.) Whup, okay. (She makes it to the phone and picks it up, without dialing.) Hello!
Vegas? Yeah, we would like some more cola, and y’know what else? We would like some
more pizza. Hello? Ohh, I forgot to dial!
 –(They both start laughing. There’s a knock on the door.)
 –Ross: That must be our cola and piza! (Gets up to answer it.)
 –Joey: Hey!
 –Ross: Ohh, it’s Joey! I love Joey! (Hugs him.)
 –Rachel: Ohh, I love Joey! Joey lives with a duck! (Goes and hugs Joey.)
 –Joey: Hi!
 –Rachel: Hey!
 –Joey: Look-look-look you guys, I need some help! Okay? Someone is going to have to
convince my hand twin to cooperate!
 –Ross: I’ll do it. Hey, whatever you need me to do, I’m your man. (He starts to sit down on
the bed. There’s one problem though, he’s about two feet to the left of it. Needless to say, he
misses and falls down.) (Looking up at Joey.) Whoa-oh-whoa! Are you, are you okay?
15

16. Opting out of a maxim
 •A Speaker opts out of observing a maxim
whenever s/he indicates unwillingness to
cooperate in the way the maxim requires.
 •This happens when a suspect exerts his right
to remain silent or when a witness chooses not
to impart information that may prove
detrimental to the defendant.
 Detective: Has the defendant ever told you she
hated her father and wanted him dead?
 Shrink: Such information is confidential and it
would be unethical to share it with you.
16

17. Suspending a maxim
 Under certain circumstances, as part of certain events ,there is no
expectation on the part of any participant that one or several maxims
should be observed (and non-fulfillment does not generate any
implicatures). Such cases include:
 1) Suspending the Quality Maxim in case of funeral orations and
obituaries, when the description of the deceased needs to be praiseworthy
and exclude any potentially unfavourable aspects of their life or
personality.
 2) Poetry suspends the Manner Maxim since it does not aim for
conciseness, clarity and lack of ambiguity.
 3) In the case of speedy communication via telegrams, e-mails, notes, the
Quantity Maxim is suspended because such means are functional owing to
their very brevity.
 4) Jokes are not only conventionally untrue, ambiguously and seemingly
incoherent, but are expected to exploit ambiguity, polysemy and vagueness
of meaning, which entails, among other things, suspension of the Maxims
of Quality, Quantity and Manner.
17

18. FLOUTING OF THE MAXIMS
 Without cooperation, human interaction
would be far more difficult and
counterproductive. Therefore, the
Cooperative Principle and the Gricean
Maxims are not specific to conversation
but to interaction as a whole. For example,
it would not make sense to reply to a
question about the weather with an
answer about groceries because it would
flout the Maxim of Relation. Likewise,
responding to a request for some milk with
an entire gallon instead of a glass would
flout the Maxim of Quantity.
18

19. A: I hear you went to the theatre last night;
what play did you see?
B: Well, I watched a number of people stand on
the stage in Elizabethan costumes uttering series
of sentences which corresponded closely with the
script of Twelfth Night.
Here, B’s verbose answer, although it
doesn’t say anything more than “I saw a
performance of Twelfth Night,” invites A to
infer that the performers were doing a
miserably bad job of acting.
19

20.  However, it is possible to flout a maxim
intentionally or unconsciously and thereby convey
a different meaning than what is literally spoken.
Many times in conversation, this flouting is
manipulated by a speaker to produce a negative
pragmatic effect, as with sarcasm or irony. One
can flout the Maxim of Quality to tell a clumsy
friend who has just taken a bad fall that her
nimble gracefulness is impressive and obviously
intend to mean the complete opposite. The
Gricean Maxims are therefore often purposefully
flouted by comedians and writers, who may hide
the complete truth and manipulate their words
for the effect of the story and the sake of the
reader’s experience.
20

21. A: What are you baking?
B: Be i are tee aitch dee ay wye see ay
kay ee.
By answering obscurely, B conveys to A
the implicature that the information is to
be kept secret from the young child who is
in the room with them. Flouting the
maxim of manner is clear.
21

22. PROPERTIES OF CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
 Conversational implicatures have the following characteristics:
1- They are context dependent:
an expression with a single meaning (i.e., expressing the same
proposition) can give rise to different conversational
implicatures in different contexts.
A: Have you cleaned the table and washed the dishes.
B: I’ve cleaned the table
2- They are cancelable:
 … a putative conversational implicature that p is explicitly
cancelable if, to the form of words the utterance of which
putatively implicates that p, it is admissible to add but not p, or
I do not mean to imply that p, and it is contextually cancelable
if one can find situations in which the utterance of the form of
words would simply not carry the implicature. (Grice,1989: 44.)
A :Did you attend the seminar and the following presentation.
B:I attended the seminar.
C: I attended the seminar and really enjoyed the presentation.
-The American and the Russians tested an atom bomb in 1962.
~+> The American and the Russians tested an atom bomb in 1962
together, not one each.
22

23. 3- They are non-detachable:
 The same propositional content in the same context will always
give rise to the same conversational implicature, in whatever form
it is expressed. The implicature is tied to the meaning ,not to
form.
A -Jazzy didn’t manage to walk as far as the crossroads.
B- Jazzy attempted to walk as far as the crossroads.
C- Jazzy didn’t walk as far as the crossroads.
A==B , A==C , B=/=C
-The film almost/nearly came close to winning an Oscar.
- +>The film didn’t quite win an Oscar.
4- They are calculable:
 A conversational implicature must be calculable ,using state able
general principles on the basis of conventional meaning together
with contextual information. Implicatures can transparently
derived from the cooperative principle and its maxims
-If a couple decided between them that if one says:
‘I’m leaving’,
it automatically means that both should leave.
23

24. 5- They are re-inforceable
A conversational implicature can be made explicit without producing
too much of a sense of redundancy.
- The soup is warm.
- +> The soup is not hot.
- The soup is warm , but not hot.
6- They are non-conventional
A conversational implicature ,though dependent on the saying of
what is coded , are non-coded in nature. They rely on the saying
of what is said but they are not part of what is said.
- I’m leaving.
- +>we together leave because we earlier have agreed on this.
7- They are universal
Huang (2007:34f) mentions that :
- Some young people like pop music.
- +> Not all young people like pop music.
Can be found in English , Arabic , Catalan, Chinese, Modern Greek,
Kashmiri, Malagasy , etc.
24

25. CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATURES
 This sixth property is what Grice considers crucial for distinguishing
between conversational and conventional implicatures. Conventional
implicatures are generated by the meaning of certain particles like
‘but’ ,’even’ , ‘yet’, or ‘therefore.’ They convey an idea of contrast , not
completion , result , but these ideas don’t affect the proposition expressed
by the utterance. Consider the difference between (1) and (2):
 He is an Englishman, therefore he is brave.
 He is an Englishman, and he is brave.
 His being brave follows from his being English.
 John lives in London and Mary lives in Oxford.
 John lives in London but Mary lives in Oxford
 According to Grice, a speaker has said the same with (1) as with (2). The
difference is that with (1) he implicates (3). This is a conventional
implicature. It is the conventional meaning of ‘therefore,’ and not maxims
of cooperation, that carry us beyond what is said.
 Grice's concept of conventional implicatures is the most controversial part
of his theory of conversation for many followers like Sperber & Wilson
(1986), for several reasons. According to some, its application to particular
examples runs against common intuitions. By using the word ‘therefore’ is
the speaker not saying that there is some causal connection between being
brave and being English?
25

26. TYPES OF CONVERSATIONAL
IMPLICATURES
 Among conversational implicatures, Grice distinguished between
‘particularized’ and ‘generalized.’
 The former are the implicatures that are generated by saying
something in virtue of some particular features of the context,
“cases in which there is no room for the idea that an implicature
of this sort is normally carried by saying that p.” (Grice ,1989:
37).The above example of conversational implicature is, then, a
case of particularized conversational implicature.
 A generalized conversational implicature occurs where “the use of
a certain forms of words in an utterance would normally (in the
absence of special circumstances) carry such-and-such an
implicature or type of implicature” (Ibid.). Grice's first example is
a sentence of the form “X is meeting a woman this evening.”
Anyone who utters this sentence, in absence of special
circumstances, would be taken to implicate that the woman in
question was someone other than X's “wife, mother, sister, or
perhaps even close platonic friend” (Ibid.) Being an implicature, it
could be cancelled, either implicitly, in appropriate circumstances,
or explicitly, adding some clause that implies its denial.
 -Most of John’s friends are from his neighbourhood .
26

27.  Also , conversational
implicatures can be scalar and
non-scalar. They are scalar as in
using ‘some’ ,,compared with
<all, most, many , some , few >:
 I’m studying linguistics and I‘ve
completed some of the required
courses.
27

28. CP CRITICISM:TANNEN’S CLAIMS
Tannen (1986:34-45) claims that Grice’s
maxims of cooperative discourse can’t
apply to ‘‘real conversations’’ because in
conversation ‘‘we wouldn’t want to simply
blurt out what we mean, because we’re
judging the needs for involvement and
independence’’.
 Tannen assumes that Grice’s maxims are
prescriptions that conversations must
follow strictly in order to be considered
cooperative.
28

29. CAMERON’S CLAIMS
 Cameron demonstrates a reductive
view of Grice’s use of the term
‘cooperation’ when she describes
Grice’s CP as an ‘inflexible’ and
‘unproductive’ apparatus that
provides yet another way for both
‘chauvinists and feminists’ to believe
that ‘whereas men compete in
competition, women use co-
operative strategies’ (1985: 40f).
29

30. COOPER’S OPINION
 Cooper (1982), interested in applying
Grice to theories of written composition,
claims that Grice advocates cooperation
because what enables conversation to
proceed is an underlying assumption that
we as conversants have purposes for
conversing and that we recognize that
these purposes are more likely to be
fulfilled if we cooperate (p. 112).
30

31. GRICE’S OPINION
Grice himself acknowledged the
difficulty some have had interpreting
his use of ‘cooperation.’ As a final
chapter to his 1989 book, Grice
wrote a ‘Retrospective Epilogue’ in
which he considered criticism of his
theories had engendered. It has
already been related that here Grice
acknowledged that his theory suffers
from a perceived naïvete´.
31

32. To combat the criticism, Grice adds useful
information about what counts as cooperative in
discourse. First, he reminds readers of the sort of
utterances he seeks to elucidate: voluntary talk
exchanges that require some form of
‘‘collaboration in achieving exchange of
information or the institution of decisions.’’ And,
he points out that within exchanges intended to
produce information or determine decisions,
cooperation ‘‘may coexist with a high degree of
reserve, hostility, and chicanery and with a high
degree of diversity in the motivations underlying
quite meager common objectives’’ (Grice, 1989:
369).
32

33.  In the maxims, Grice believes he has
found universal conventions that all people
may regularly follow in their meaning-
making talk exchanges. In order for such a
set of conventions to function, a certain
degree of at least tacit assent to those
conventions is necessary. Thus, the term
‘cooperation’ is quite apt. The crucial
subtlety of Grice’s theory is this:
interlocutors do not necessarily cooperate
with each other; they cooperate with a set
of conventions that allows each
interlocutor to produce approximate
enough meanings for communication to
work.
33

34. GRICE’S CLARIFICATION
 The aim for Gricean conversation
analysis – and thus the CP and the
maxims – is not to advocate
benevolent cooperation, but to prove
the rationality of conversation. ‘‘. . .
observance [of the maxims]
promotes and their violation [except
in the case of implicature]
dispromotes conversational
rationality’’ (Grice, 1989: 370).
34

35. COPERATIVE:INTERLOCUTORS OR
THEIR CONTRIBUTION!
 Although many have claimed Grice’s writing on
the CP is ambiguous and is on occasion
inconsistent with terminology, this should not be
said of Grice’s measured use of the term
‘cooperation.’ Precise readings of Grice’s writing
on cooperation demonstrate that he rarely, if
ever, describes interlocutors as being
cooperative. Rather, he claims that interlocutors’
contributions to conversation are cooperative.
The contributions are uttered in cooperation with
a set of conventions for producing meaning. In
this sense, we might think of a pair of
interlocutors as each operating according to the
dictates of a set of conventions (the maxims) and
thus they are ‘cooperators’: two operators of
discourse operating at once.
35

36. COMMUNICATION IS
HAPHAZARD
 The second major critique of the
Cooperative Principle has been a topic of
spirited discussion among linguistic
philosophers since Grice first proposed it.
Grice himself identifies the problem as
resulting from the thought that
communication is simply too ‘‘haphazard’’
to be described accurately as having a
cooperative end. Some forms of
communication are not appropriately
described by the CP.
36

37. GRICE’SUGGESTIONS
 Grice suggests the problem is two-fold:
First, he agrees with critics that the maxims
appear less ‘‘coordinate’’ than he would prefer.
The maxim of quality appears in some ways more
definitive of information than the other maxims.
And, the maxims are not independent enough:
relevance has been often regarded as containing
the essence of the other maxims.
Second, Grice’s selection of cooperation as the
‘‘supreme Conversational Principle’’ underpinning
the rationalizing operations of implicature
remains, to say the least, not generally accepted
(1989: 371).
37

38.  Though in his final work he admitted
some misgivings and offered minor
refinements of his maxims of
cooperative discourse, Grice, up until
his death in 1988, defended his
selection of the Cooperative Principle
as the ‘supreme principle.’
38

39. NEO-GRICEAN PRAGMATICS
 Grice’s influence is most apparent in a
branch of linguistic study that has become
known among some as Neo-Gricean
pragmatics. Scholars in this field, like
Horn(1989) and Levinson (1991) have
greatly revised Grice’s maxims of
cooperative discourse in a variety of
interesting ways, but they have
maintained the basic direction of Grice’s
work, especially in regard to the concept
of conversational implicature.
39

40. THE RELEVANCE THEORY
 Sperber & Wilson (1986) produced one of the most
influential alternatives to Grice’s theory. They
developed a theory of relevance based on a number
of assumptions about communication:
 1- Every utterance has a variety of linguistically
possible interpretations, all compatible with the
decoded sentence meaning.
 2. Not all these interpretations are equally
accessible to the hearer (i.e. equally likely to come to
the hearer’s mind) on a given occasion.
 3. Hearers are equipped with a single, very general
criterion for evaluating interpretations as they occur
to them, and accepting or rejecting them as
hypotheses about the speaker’s meaning.
 4. This criterion is powerful enough to exclude all
but at most a single interpretation (or a few closely
similar interpretations), so that the hearer is entitled
to assume that the first hypothesis that satisfies it (if
any) is the only plausible one .
40

41.  Sperber and Wilson argued that all of Grice’s
maxims could be replaced by a single
principle of relevance that the speaker tries
to be as relevant as possible in the
circumstances (1986). Davis (2005) argues
that Sperber and Wilson’s theory suffers
from some of the same problems as Grice’s,
including:
 overgeneralization of implicatures
 a clash with the principle of style
 a clash with the principle of politeness
41

42. How to analyze a text
 The selected text is The Creak, a short play by
The selected text is The Creak, a short play by
Yousif Al-Ani, translated by Dr.Mohammed
Darweesh (Mamoon House,2010),pp.23-41. The
procedure adopted in analyzing the text is the
following:
 Numerating the starting of each line. The total
number is 539 lines.
 The text will be examined from a conversationally-
organized orientation , in the sense that a full
conversation will be regarded as the functional
context.
 Identifying the existent implicatures.
 Classifying implicatures into conventional or
conversational (scalar or non-scalar).
 The selected approach is Grice ‘s classification into
conversational vs conventional implicatures.
 Reference will be shed on their maxims.
42

43. 1-He: Good morning life, good morning world…
(Turns to the door) may you last long ,creak ,for as
long as you are there, I am here! Go on with your
music,for you are the sign of my life and existence.
 +> He expresses his loneliness to the extent he
regards the door creaky sound a lovely piece of
music.
 A conversational implicature where Flouting the
maxim of quality is so clear by using hedges like ‘as
far as ‘, and the manner maxim in using the modal
‘may’.
2- He: this is enough, it suffices to remind the muscles
of life and work
 +> He regards the creak of the door as the ultimate
sign of action and movement in the sense that his
life is such a quiet one. A conversational implicature
of the maxim of manner is maintained by using
‘enough’ and ‘suffice’.
43

44. 3-He: impossible …you…impossible!!
She: Let me at least say hello before you shout. It
reminds me of your voice when you used to rage and
scream.
 +> He saw her after a long period of time. Both are
friends or relatives that she still had some memories
about his reaction. A conversational implicatures of
the maxim of relation. This implicatures is of two
sides; in the first line ,it is flouted by using
‘impossible’ as scalar implicature .In the second
line ,this conversational implicatures is followed
without any form of violation simply by using ‘at
least’, which in turn stopped the possibility of
another scalar implicatures.
4-She: My house is in a densely populated area.
He: I do not …
 +> She lives in such a popular area or in a city, or
many people always visit her, in comparison of his. A
conversational implicature where flouting of the
maxim of quantity is clear ,since more than one
alternative is possible. He opts out this maxim since
he does not complete his statement.
44

45. 5-She :I wanted to depend on myself. I am still able to be
of value to people and the world, and be delighted by their
happiness. I do not want to be a small part of a whole.
He: You still philosophize as usual.
 +>She has the ability to help other people and she is
willingly eager to do that A conversational implicatures
that she is still productive and useful despite being in the
sixties. She still has many ambitions to be done , which are
regarded as somehow difficult therefore he described the
situation as a sort of philosophy. Flouting of the maxim of
quantity is clear in the scalar implicature by ‘able to’ and
‘small’.
6-He: Do not you feel lonely sometimes?
She: Sometimes? Yes, I do and …
He: And what?
She: Aha! Am I on a social visit or to give you an account
of my private life?
 +> He is behind something that at that age, does she feel
lonely like him, or something else? The difference is that
she has friends visiting her all the time ,whereas he has
nothing. A conversational implicatures where flouting of
the maxim of quantity is evident. Another implicatures is in
the last line where the maxim of relation is clear.
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46. 7-He: Let me bring you coffee first …I will be back soon.
She: still moving about like a small child.
 +> She is commenting on his way of moving may be
because of his age or other factors. Also , the verb ‘moving’
can be interpreted as behaving ,since she has spent more
than one hour without anything to be offered.
 A conversational implicatures with the maxim of quality.
Using ‘first’ stops the possibility of violating this maxim.
8-She: I gave up smoking three years ago…Have you
forgotten?
He: I did too only a year ago.
 +> Both are not smokers now.
 A conversational implicatures suspended the quality
maxim. It is quite easy to a speaker to suspend the
implicatures (only) using the expression ‘at least’ : ‘I did
too at least a year ago’. Also ,it can be cancelled by adding
further information ,often following the expression ‘in fact’:
I did too only a year ago, in fact , ten months from now.
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47. 9-She: I’ll finish some paper work and be back.
 +>She intends to do part of the work. This is realized as a
scalar implicature <all ,most, many, some, few>.
 A conversational implicatures where flouting the quantity
maxim is clear.
10-She: whenever she writes a letter to her uncle she
includes lines of verse.
 +> Her granddaughter is either studying literary subjects
and writing verse ,or quoting verse without studying
literary subjects , or reading poetry without writing.
 A conversational implicature with flouting of the quality
maxim.
11-She: To the bus. Perhaps it is repaired now and they
are waiting for me….Thank you for the coffee.
He: Thanks for the visit. Do it often….
 +> She has finished her visit. The reason that led he to
this visit is repairing the bus. So she lives away from him.
 A conversational implicature of the quality maxim where
flouting is clear in using ‘perhaps’.
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48. 12-She: They repaired the bus quickly and
took whoever was nearby, leaving the
others behind?
He: What will you do?
She: I will wait for the next one.
He: When will it arrive?
She: Within an hour as well.
 +> They repaired the bus and left many
behind and she is one of them. Her decision
is to wait the next one.
 More than one conversational implicature
here: the first one is related to the flouting
of the maxim of manner by using ‘whoever’
and ‘others’. The second one is flouting the
maxim of quality by using ‘within’ , and this
maxim ,on the other hand is kept by using
‘the next’.
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