1079: Cooperative Principles Nov 22, 2017

Having an understandable sentiment linguistically is more than simply the grammar of a sentence when considered in isolation. The term Cooperative Principle describes the idea that people will speak in a way that is suitable to the context of the conversation, both linguistically and otherwise. The four Gricean maxims, simply put, identify rules by which people know how to talk to each other. First, there is the maxim of relevance: the notion that people will give relevant information. A somewhat exaggerated example how this is broken could be:
Speaker 1: "how's the weather?"
Speaker 2: "I like cats"
Next, there is the maxim of quality, which states that people cooperating in a conversation would tell what they believe is truthful. To lie would violate this maxim. For the following two maxims, there is some overlap. The maxim of quantity posits that people try to be as brief as they can, and the maxim of manner states that people will try to be as clear as they can—which could entail being brief—but also stating things in a way that is, for instance, chronological and grammatical. If you wanted to be annoying and confusing, you could try throwing in an irrelevant, long-winded, and unclearly stated lie into your conversation, but this also works for some jokes, such as
"In which battle did Davy Crockett die?"..."his last one", which does not violate the maxim of quality, but could be said to break the maxim of relevance, arguably.