Cooperative principle in spoken discourse

27Jun10

by Marie Meininger

Conversations are part of our everyday life, every time we meet people and communicate with each other a conversation takes place. But do we ever take a closer look at our conversations, how they are composed, if there are schemes or if our conversations are efficient?

Linguists did take a closer look at conversations and found out about the ‘cooperative principle’. It describes how people interact with one another, they work together to achieve some goal in a conversation and they normally attempt to be informative, truthful, relevant, and clear in a conversation.

The Linguist Paul Grice found out about four conversational ‘maxims,’ which are commandments that people follow (or should follow) to further the conversation efficiently:

Quantity:

Say no less than the conversation requires.
Say no more than the conversation requires

nonessential information declines the efficiency of your conversation

2. Quality:

Don’t say what you believe to be false.
Don’t say things for which you lack evidence.

3. Manner:

Don’t be obscure.
Don’t be ambiguous.
Be brief.
Be orderly.

4. Relevance:

Be relevant.

This video clearly shows the constraints of the cooperative principle. This conversation is obviously inefficient. The cooperative principle neglects some factors, which also have influences on conversations for example politeness, irony or ohter social factors. There are new theories already coming up to improve conversational analyises including these factors, but the researches are still not completed.

For further information use these sources:

Grice, Paul (1975). “Logic and conversation”. In Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts, ed. P. Cole & J. Morgan. New York: Academic Press. Reprinted in Studies in the Way of Words, ed. H. P. Grice, pp. 22?40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1989)

Cameron, D. (2001). Working with Spoken Discourse. London: Sage Publications.

or have a look at these links:

http://www.answers.com/topic/cooperative-principle

http://www1.appstate.edu/~mcgowant/grice.htm

http://grammar.about.com/od/c/g/cooperativeprincipleterm.htm

What do you think? Is this principle still useful for discourse analysis or did it lose plausibility?