philosopher. H. P. Grice delivered three speeches in his William James lectures at Harvard University in 1967. Amongthese, the second lecture entitled “Logic and Conversation” came out in 1975 in Syntax and Semantics. There, hepresented the theory of “Cooperative Principle” and “Conversational Implicature.”In order to understand comprehensively and thoroughly the purpose and the significance of the proposition of“cooperative principle” and “conversational implicature,” we should figure out some ideas of Grice’s basic theory about“meaning,” which can be divided into natural meaning and non-natural meaning. Natural meaning refers to the meaningof the utterance that can be generally gained by the conversational participants. While the meaning refers to theintended meaning conveyed by the speaker and must be inferred by the receiver in particular contexts. On the base of it,Grice proposed the key ideas of conversational implicature in 1967. If the participants both have the expectation toachieve a successful conversation, they must cooperative with each other, and speak sincerely, sufficiently, relevantlyand clearly. To put it another way, they must observe the co-operative principle and the maxims of Quality, Quantity,Relevance and Manner. If someone who participate the conversation flouts the co-operative principle and any of themaxims, he must have intended to do so. And the receiver can infer the speaker’s intended meaning in particularcontexts. For example:A: Do you know when John left the pub last night?B: Eleven o’clock. And he went to Mary’s apartment instead of his own.According to quantity maxim, the contribution should not be more informative than is required. In this way, in theexample, as the answer to A, generally, “Eleven o’clock,” is enough. However, B adds the later sentence, provides someinformation that seems not necessary and violates the quatntity maxim. We infer that B wants to tell A that John mighthave some special relationship with Mary
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