Grice's conversational implicature versus Sperber and Wilson's 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.

3.0 Conclusion/Critique

For Grice, pragmatics mainly dealt with the implicit aspects of communications and he had included no notion of relevance. Wilson and Sperber recognized that pragmatic principles make an important contribution to determining what is explicitly communicated. However, relevance theory does not explain how to measure contextual effects and processing costs, how to make them commensurate with each other, or why there is always a unique way of satisfying the principle (Bach and Harnish 1987).

Relevance theory does not do justice to the fact that pragmatic information is tied to the fact that the speaker is uttering it. Contextual information about the immediate situation such as what has been said previously, the relationship of the speaker and the listener, or their background knowledge, is relevant to the interpretation of the utterance only because it is intended, or can reasonably be taken as intended, to be taken into account.