Pragmatics in the communication theory (Grice, Levinson)

While the former scholars dealing with the theory of communication reflect on more selective issues, such as the elements engaged in communication or its basic means, what Grice primarily does is to turn towards a real communication in discourse. He realizes that in communication the meaning does not exclusively arise from what is expressed by an utterance, but there are some other elements that fundamentally decide about the meaning suggested by the speaker and perceived by the hearer due to their common intention to communicate.

Grice is assured that “The philosophical demand for an ideal language rests on certain assumptions that should not be conceded” (Grice 1975: 41). He believes that what is uttered in a conversation is not necessarily meant. To explain what the meaning really is and how communication works he first introduces a term of an “implicature” (Grice 1975: 43-44). He states that “some implicatures are conventional”, by which he understands some standard ways of behaviour of participants in communication when both, the speaker and the hearer, know what the message really is, disregarding actual words used (Grice 1975: 44-45). The author also introduces the term “conversational implicature”, which he characterizes as “a certain subclass of nonconventional implicatures […], being essentially connected with certain general features of discourse” (Grice 1975: 45). The author eventually defines a conversational implicature in the following way:

A general pattern for the working out of a conversational implicature might he given as follows: ‘He has said that p; there is no reason to suppose that he is not observing the maxims, or at least the CP; he could not be doing this unless he thought that q; he knows (and knows that I know that he knows) that I can see that the supposition that he thinks that q is required; he has done nothing to stop me thinking that q; he intends me to think, or is at least willing to allow me to think, that q; and so he has implicated that q. (Grice 1975: 50)

What needs to be explained in the connection with the definition quoted above is the fact that Grice sees communication through the perspective of cooperation between the speaker and the hearer. He believes that:

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Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction. (Grice 1975: 45)

He calls these efforts “the cooperative principle” (Grice 1975: 45) and proposes to consider “making your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs” by following some maxims, in which another idea of prescriptive rules for communicative patterns can be observed. The more these maxims are followed the better communication between its subjects.

Based on the idea of the cooperative principle existence in conversations, the author builds the rest of his theory being confident that:

On the assumption that some such general principle as this is acceptable, one may perhaps distinguish four categories under one or another of which will fall certain more specific maxims and submaxims, the following of which will, in general, yield results in accordance with the Cooperative Principle. Echoing Kant, I call these categories Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. (Grice 1975: 45)

He then discusses the categories distinguished ascribing to the category of Quantity the following maxims: “1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange), 2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.” (Grice 1975: 45).

Within the category of Quality Grice places a supermaxim – “Try to make your contribution one that is true”, and, as he claims, “two more specific maxims: 1. Do not say what you believe to be false. 2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence “ (Grice 1975: 46). Under the category of Relation he mentions one maxim: “Be relevant” (Grice 1975: 46). To characterize the category of Manner, which he understands “as relating not (like the previous categories) to what is said but, rather, to how what is said is to be said” (Grice 1975: 46), he proposes considering the supermaxim “Be perspicuous”, and some other maxims such as: “1. Avoid obscurity of expression, 2. Avoid ambiguity, 3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity), 4. Be orderly” (Grice 1975: 46).

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As far as Grice’s maxims are not violated, they represent a pattern of model conversation. They have also the potential of distorting a required message and deceiving, while violated, especially within the category of Quality and Manner. The Quality directly refers to truthfulness, and the Manner has plenty to do with the specific construction of texts so as to make the hearer perceive the message in an intended way by the speaker or translator, which will be broadly discussed in Chapter 3 and the analytical part of the dissertation in the connection with Newspeak and translations under the communist rule in Poland.

Some of the issues introduced by Grice and relevant for our study are also discussed by Levinson. Levinson basically follows Grice’s tradition of discourse perception in one crucial conviction – that the overall meaning of communication acts does not evolve from the meaning expressed merely by utterances, but also by some means aimed and revealed in between or accompanying the real linguistic contents, which can considerably change the information included in words. His pragmatic attitude to the meaning in a discourse is observed in his belief that:

Speech acts can also be seen to be fundamentally context dependent. First, speech acts are dependent on, and contribute to, the context in which speech is taking place. One way of seeing this is to construe speech acts as operations on the context (conceived of as sets of propositions taken for granted): a statement adds a proposition to the context, a question requests that such a proposition is added, a denial removes one, and so on.

(Levinson 2001: 7)

Levinson assures, as Grice does, that overt violation of maxims creates some implicit, indirect meaning. He shows the violation of the maxim of Quality in the example he quotes, which is: “Thank God I didn’t bother to bring my umbrella”. The sentence uttered while it is raining shows an intended irony of the speaker, which is generated and perceived by the hearer in the cooperation with the addresser (Levinson 2001: 9).

Levinson mentions that the modern implicature theory has its own maxims but they still follow Grice’s ideas. There are two main branches of this theory. One states that some background principles we are equipped with and use while producing inferences in our minds, allowing us to understand linguistic propositions in full, are “innate cognitive mechanisms of information processing”. The other branch states that “these principles follow from rational design characteristics of communication”. To apply the latter one we often choose an option

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to assert the weaker, less informative expression which will suggest that the stronger expression does not apply on the scale, as in Levinson’s example: “Some of the students are punctual”, implicating that “not all of the students are punctual”. Such a case of using a weaker implicit expression in a belief that a stronger explicit one will not be a good choice is referred to as the so-called “scalar implicature” (Levinson 2001: 10-11).

Discussing modern maxims Levinson states that:

Contemporary neo-Gricean theory recognizes two or three maxims, for example a maxim of Quantity (or Q-principle, giving us the scalar implicatures […]), a maxim that maximizes information from direct, unmarked expressions (an Informativeness or I-principle), and a maxim of Manner or markedness (or M-principle) that curtails those informative interpretations. (Levinson 2001: 11)

The idea of maxims, continued in theoretical assumptions of scholars dealing with communication, proves Grice’s theory that we can intentionally violate the prescriptive means aimed to communicate properly. It is important for seeking some theoretical background for the occurrence of manipulation in ideologically influenced texts.

All in all, taking into consideration all aspects referred to in Levinson’s theory, the author does not question any of Grice’s beliefs and the following sounds like his most crucial statement:

Thus what is coded semantically and what is inferred pragmatically are often necessarily integrated in the extraction of propositional content. The implication is that there is a single level of representation to which quite different kinds of principles contribute – semantics and logical inference on the one hand, and pragmatics and presumptive reasoning on the other. (Levinson 2001: 12)

This idea is concurrently stated by the assumptions of the Relevance Theory, which will be described in the subsequent section, regarding its potential of communication influenced by intentions, whatever they might be.

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1.4 Principles, norms and means of communication according to Relevance