The cooperative principle

2.1. The cooperative principle

An insight into indirectness is based on the Cooperative Principle developed by Paul Grice [4, 14-76]: language users tacitly agree to cooperate by making their contributions to the conversation to further it in the desired direction. Grice endeavoured to establish a set of general principles explaining how language users convey indirect meanings (so-called conversational implicatures, i.e. implicit meanings which have to be inferred from what is being said explicitly, on the basis of logical deduction). Adherence to this principle entails that speakers simultaneously observe 4 maxims:

 1) Maxim of Quality:

- Do not say what you believe to be false.

- Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

2) Maxim of Relevance:

- Be relevant.

3) Maxim of Quantity:

- Make your contribution as informative as required.

- Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

4) Maxim of Manner:

- Avoid obscurity of expression.

- Avoid ambiguity.

- Be brief.

 - Be orderly.

This general description of the normal expectations we have in conversations helps to explain a number of regular features in the way people say things. For instance, the common expressions "Well, to make a long story short" or "I won't bore you with the details" indicate an awareness of the maxims of quantity and manner. Because we assume that other speakers are following these maxims, we often draw inferences based on this assumption.

At one level, cooperative behaviour between the interactants means that the conversational maxims are being followed; but at another and more important level, cooperative behaviour still operates even if the conversational maxims are apparently broken.  For instance, when the speaker blatantly and openly says something which appears to be irrelevant and ambiguous (flouts the maxims of relevance and manner), it can be assumed that s/he really intends to communicate something which is relevant and unambiguous, but does so implicitly:

“ - I don't suppose you could manage tomorrow evening?

- How do you like to eat?

- Actually I rather enjoy cooking myself.” [J. Fowles]

The second remark, instead of being a direct answer (a statement), is a question formally not connected with the first remark. The maxims of relevance and manner are flouted. The inferable implicature is: “Yes, I can.”Analogously, the implication of the third remark is inferred: “I invite you to have dinner at my place.”

If we were forced to draw only logical inferences, life would be a lot more difficult. Conversations would take longer since we would have to say things which reasonable language-users currently infer.

Searle adds one more conversational maxim [45, 126]: “Speak idiomatically unless you have a reason not to.” He exemplifies this maxim like this: if we say archaically “Knowest thou him who calleth himself Richard Nixon?” (not idiomatically), the utterance will not be perceived as a usual question “Do you know Richard Nixon?”

An important difference between implicatures and what is said directly is that the speaker can always renounce the implicatures s/he hinted at. For example, in “Love and friendship” by A.Lourie the protagonist answers to a lady asking him to keep her secret: “A gentleman never talks of such things”. Later the lady finds out that he did let out her secret, and the protagonist justifies himself saying: “I never said I was a gentleman.”

Implicatures put a question of insincerity and hypocrisy people resort to by means of a language (it is not by chance that George Orwell introduced the word “to double speak” in his novel “1984”). No doubt, implicatures are always present in human communication. V.Bogdanov notes that numerous implicatures raise the speaker’s and the hearer’s status in each other’s eyes: the speaker sounds intelligent and knowledgeable about the nuances of communication, and the hearer realizes that the speaker relies on his shrewdness. “Communication on the implicature level is a prestigious type of verbal communication. It is widely used by educated people: to understand implicatures, the hearer must have a proper intellectual level.” (Богданов 1990:21).

The ancient rhetorician Demetrius declared the following: “People who understand what you do not literally say are not just your audience. They are your witnesses, and well-wishing witnesses at that. You gave them an occasion to show their wit, and they think they are shrewd and quick-witted. But if you “chew over” your every thought, your hearers will decide your opinion of their intellect is rather low.” (Деметрий 1973:273).

2.2. The theory of politeness

Another line of explanation of indirectness is provided by a sociolinguistic theory of politeness developed in the late 1970s. Its founder Geoffrey Leech introduced the politeness principle: people should minimize the expression of impolite beliefs and maximize the expression of polite beliefs [36, 102]. According to the politeness theory, speakers avoid threats to the “face” of the hearers by various forms of indirectness, and thereby “implicate” their meanings rather than assert them directly. The politeness theory is based on the notion that participants are rational beings with two kinds of “face wants” connected with their public self-image [26, 215]:

• positive face - a desire to be appreciated and valued by others; desire for approval;

• negative face - concern for certain personal rights and freedoms, such as autonomy to choose actions, claims on territory, and so on; desire to be unimpeded.

Some speech acts (“face threatening acts”) intrinsically threaten the faces. Orders and requests, for instance, threaten the negative face, whereas criticism and disagreement threaten the positive face. The perpetrator therefore must either avoid such acts altogether (which may be impossible for a host of reasons, including concern for her/his own face) or find ways of performing them with mitigating of their face threatening effect. For example, an indirectly formulated request (a son to his father) “Are you using the car tonight?” counts as a face-respecting strategy because it leaves room for father to refuse by saying “Sorry, it has already been taken (rather than the face-threatening “You may not use it”). In that sense, the speaker’s and the hearer’s faces are being attended to.

Therefore, politeness is a relative notion not only in its qualitative aspect (what is considered to be polite), but in its quantitative aspect as well (to what degree various language constructions realize the politeness principle). Of course there are absolute markers of politeness, e.g. “please”, but they are not numerous. Most of language units gain a certain degree of politeness in a context.

3. HOW DO HEARERS DISCOVER INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS AND “DECIPHER” THEIR MEANING?

It has been pointed out above that in indirect speech acts the relationship between the words being uttered and the illocutionary force is often oblique. For example, the sentence “This is a pig sty” might be used nonliterally to state that a certain room is messy and filthy and, further, to demand indirectly that it be cleaned up. Even when this sentence is used literally and directly, say to describe a certain area of a barnyard, the content of its utterance is not fully determined by its linguistic meaning - in particular, the meaning of the word “this” does not determine which area is being referred to.

How do we manage to define the illocution of an utterance if we cannot do that by its syntactic form? There are several theories trying to answer this question.