
Grice's Maxims - Flenser
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html
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mannykannot
One can probably shoehorn the notion, that one should take into account the
knowledge, beliefs and attitude of one's audience, into these four maxims,
though I think it could stand as one on its own.

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henryoz
Worth noting that you can still successfully communicate while flouting one or
more of the maxims. Sarcasm and irony show that tone and context play largely
into understanding as well.

~~~
adimitrov
This common "criticism" of Grice's Maxims isn't one, but a misunderstanding of
the Maxims themselves.

In everyday conversation the Maxims do hold, that's the point. When they break
down, you get "marked" effects — marked is a linguist's way of saying
"unusual." This doesn't make the utterances _wrong_. Violating Grice's Maxims
may cause miscommunication, or induce effects such as sarcasm, irony or
humour, but also a slew of other, more mundane pragmatic effects.

Think of Grice's Maxims not as legislation you _have_ to abide by. Think of
them as laws of conversation (law in the scientific sense) which generally
hold. I can subvert the law of gravity by jumping. But I need to invest
energy, and I will cause an effect which will perturb the current reference
frame in all manner of ways.

Similarly, I can lie, be facetious, tongue-in-cheek, etc. But that's not the
_default_ state of communication.

The Maxims aren't there to _be obeyed_. They're there to _describe_
communication, and also describe non-cooperative communication when they're
violated.

~~~
foldr
I think it's also worth noting that the maxims themselves are tongue-in-cheek.
For example, "be brief" in the Maxim of Manner is given the unnecessarily
prolix gloss "avoid unnecessary prolixity". I don't think Grice meant that
particular list of maxims to be taken too seriously. They're just intended to
illustrate how conversation is structured by the cooperative principle. In my
view, this renders rather silly some of the earnest subsequent discussion of
"which maxim" is violated by various example utterances.

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zeckalpha
A key point is balancing these, sometimes fully satisfying one will ignore
another. Communication is all about balance.

Note that these apply to programming languages as much as they do to natural
language.

~~~
adimitrov
They apply to _communication_. That's the fun thing. Ultimately, implicatures
(a corollary of Grice's Maxims) are an information theoretic concept, though I
haven't yet seen research that treats them as such. I would love to read about
it, though.

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globbaphoul
Phil Resnik's dissertation ("A Class-Based Approach to Lexical Relationships
",
[https://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/10010143379/](https://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/10010143379/))
uses information theory to investigate why some direct objects are optional
(e.g., "I ate [food]") while others are not (e.g., *"I brought [food]").

I extended his information theory to look at how Grice's Maxims would play in
to modification of these direct objects ("The Semantics of Optionality",
[https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1658214586.html?FMT=ABS](https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1658214586.html?FMT=ABS)).
In terms of Grice's Maxims + information theory, does modifying a required
direct object ("marking it", as noted in a comment below)
informationaly/entropically different from modifying an optional direct
object? (This is further clouded by the concept of syntactic optionality being
separable from semantic optionality.

~~~
adimitrov
Thanks for your pointers. I had actually read (parts of) Resnik's diss and
further work, but apparently it had slipped my mind, or I just forgot about
it.

Your work sounds really interesting, too. I hadn't heard of Firth's model yet;
it sounds like it's in the spirit of distributional semantics. I hope I can
find some time to give it a read!

