Conversational Implicature and Relevance Theory

Conversational Implicature and Relevance Theory This paper provides and overview of Grice's Theory of Conversational Implicature and then compares it with Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory. A critique of the two theories finds that the work of Sperber and Wilson provides an incremental improvement of Grice's work, but still falls short in fully explaining communications.

Grice's Theory of Conversational Implicature Grice proposes that participants in conversation understand the "Cooperative Principle" to be in force: "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." This principle comprises the following rules: Maxims of Quantity: 1. Make your contribution as informative as is required 2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Maxims of Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true. 1.

Do not say what you believe to be false. 2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence III. Maxim of Relation: Be relevant. IV. Maxims of Manner: Be perspicuous. 1. Avoid obscurity / of expression. 2. Avoid ambiguity. 3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). 4. Be orderly. Grice identifies two kinds of maxim-violation that convey an unstated but meant meaning, which he called conversational implicature. Grice states that some implicatures break a maxim so as to invoke the Cooperative Principle as a ground of interpretation.

And, it's possible to flout a maxim on the literal level (what is said) so as to invoke the same maxim at a figurative level (what is implicated). Irony and metaphor are two standard forms of maxim-exploiting implicature.

For example, when asked what she thinks of a new restaurant, a woman replies, "They have handsome carpets." If there is no reason to doubt that she means to be observing the Cooperative Principle and is capable of doing so, then her remark must mean something other than what it literally asserts -- such as the food there is at best mediocre. Some implicatures flout a maxim so as to invoke another maxim as a ground of interpretation.

And, there is an implicature, which involves no maxim-violation at all, but simply invokes a maxim as a ground of interpretation. For example, if one person says "I am out of gas," and another says "There is a gas station around the corner," the response implicates, by invoking the maxim of Relation, that the person thinks it possible that the station is open and has gas to sell.

2.0 Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory Wilson and Sperber believe Grice's distinction between "what is said" and "what is conversationally implicated" to be inadequate. They claim, instead, that the proposition expressed by an utterance ("what is said") is also derived using pragmatic processes.

They further criticize Grice's analysis of irony and metaphor, and call for a separate treatment of these within a theory of rhetoric." Therefore, Wilson and Sperber reduce Grice's maxims to a single principle of relevance: a rational speaker will choose an utterance that will provide the hearer with a maximum number of contextual implications in a minimum processing effort. The Relevance Maxim has two rules: I. An assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that its contextual effects in this context are large. II.

An assumption is irrelevant in a context to the extent that the effort required to process it in this context is large. Furthermore, according to Wilson and Sperber, a proposition is relevant to a context if it interacts in a certain way with the context's existing assumptions about the world, i.e., if it has some contextual effects in some context that are accessible. These contextual effects include: I. Contextual implication: A new assumption can be used together with the existing rules in the context to generate new assumptions; II.

Strengthening an existing axiom: A new assumption can strengthen some of the existing assumptions of.