CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE GRICEAN MAXIMS IN THE UNDERSTANDING OF MEANING: A REVIEW

Abstract

This paper attempts to review how the Gricean maxims contribute to the understanding of meaning cooperatively and mutually. The review identified that observing Gricean’s Cooperative Principle can help one to communicate with less ambiguity in a conversation. To observe the Cooperative Principle, H. P. Grice identified four maxims namely: Maxims of quantity, of quality, of relation, and, of manner. Nonetheless, speakers, sometimes, deliberately omit certain parts of their utterances in a conversation in order to send a message to their listeners that is contrary to their actual utterances. This deliberate omission is technically referred to as non-observance of the Gricean’s maxims. This omission sends a signal to the listener to compensate for the meaning by guessing. The listener-meaning may have an effect: positive or negative. In so doing, the main purpose of communication can be distorted, there could be many possible interpretations of what has been said. For this reason, the use of the Cooperative Principle is paramount to create an avenue for both the speaker and the listener to act cooperatively, and mutually accept one another in the process of communication. Therefore, there is a need for communicators to understand one another and cooperate in order to construct a meaningful conversation. This principle led to the development of ‘Pragmatics’ as a separate discipline within linguistics that studies the use of language and context within a community. Thus, this paper explains how the Gricean maxims contribute to the understanding of meaning through an explicit review of related literature on Grice’s maxims. The paper concluded that the Gricean maxims still remain at the centre of pragmatics and the role they play in the understanding of meaning cannot be denied.