The concept of implicature in (Mis)‎ understanding grice cooperative principal

Abstract EN

The concept of implicature is a fundamental and far-reaching one for studies concerned with politeness and impoliteness – the present one included.

With the exception of such direct, baldly expressed phrases as, 'take a seat' and 'quiet! ' (both of which can be polite or impolite depending on the context) what interactants communicate, either politely or impolitely, is often very different from the core, unvarnished, propositional content of their message(s).

Academically, different views of politeness and impoliteness have, by and large, adopted either a Gricean (1975, 1978, 1981, 1989) maxim-based approach or a Sperber and Wilson (1995) relevance-theory approach.

Both, however, have their issues and I will explain the reasons, here, why I choose to follow a Gricean approach in this model.

This seems especially prudent in light of the fact that there are at least two major and decidedly different interpretations of the Cooperative Principle, partly because Grice's own writings and conceptualisations of the CP are (a) less than watertight, which I explore below, and (b) were continually developed right up until his death in 1988.