Violating and flouting the cooperative principle in some selected short stories

الملخص EN

The present research aims to study the role of language in communication and the main properties of the assumed meaning that is conveyed through language.

This work , directed by and built upon Grice's Theory of Implicature with its main principle ( The cooperative principle, which embodes maxims the four Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner), and it tries to show that the meaning of an utterance would not be complete if it does not taken into account the intentions of the speaker.

The study attempts to show that language and context with all their elements cannot be separated, and that ,as a consequence , the meaning conveyed should by no means seen as a decontextualized activity .

Yet , the main aim of this work is the attempt to show that Grice's four conversational maxims are not fixed rules but maxims that can be broken easily or flouted on many occasions.

The research includes five sections : the first section is devoted to the introduction which states the problem, aim and scope of the study and some important linguistic concepts and Grice's four maxims .The second section includes the main difference between linguistic principles and rules.

The third section states some different philosophical and linguistic points of view , which agree and refuse Grice's four maxims.

In the fourth section, three models of analysis are presented and an eclectic model is developed to be used in the process of analysis.

The fifth section introduces the conclusions which this work arrives at .