Engl 241: Intro to Study of Language. Malone, UI Spring '20. Pragmatics. Grice's Maxims.

1. Pragmatics II: Felicity and Flouting

2. The textbook briefly covers Grice’s
Conversational Maxims on page 198-200.
However, I wanted to expand on these by
providing more examples. In particular, I
want to emphasize something called
felicity conditions and to further
demonstrate the importance of flouting
maxims.

3. What’s the
point of the
maxims?
One source of confusion last semester was
that some students thought the maxims were
rules for how conversations should be. That is
not the case! Rather, the maxims serve to
describe how conversations typically go. They
are a basic framework for analyzing discourse
between people.
(Please be sure you have read the chapter on
Pragmatics before continuing. I am assuming
you have the basic definitions of the maxims
down already…)

4. Felicity: Analyzing Conversations
• Felicity helps us answer: “Was that
utterance appropriate in the context of
that conversation?”
• Note: Appropriate doesn’t refer to
“politeness” or “good behavior.” It
refers to whether the utterance follows
the rules of conversation in that
language/context.
• One way to evaluate whether an
utterance is felicitous or infelicitous is
to apply the four maxims.

5. The Quantity Maxim
• Imagine: Two people meet for the first time.
The first asks, “Where are you from?” The
second explains in great detail that their
ancestors came from various European
countries and settled on the east coast during
the late 19th century, but ultimately migrated
out West during Expansionism and led to their
birth at Gritman Hospital in Moscow, ID at the
end of the 21st century, etc. etc.
• TOO MUCH INFORMATION!

6. The Quantity Maxim
(Cont.)
• Alternatively, imagine someone places an
order over the phone and asks the customer
service rep, “When will this arrive?” The
customer service rep says, “In the future.”
• TOO LITTLE INFORMATION!

7. The Quantity Maxim
(Cont.)
• In both those examples, the
speaker’s response was
infelicitous. Technically,
they answer the question in
a way that makes semantic
sense, but pragmatically,
the speaker did not
understand the contextual
cues which revealed how
much information was
appropriate.

8. The Quality
Maxim
• A speaker must not be intentionally misleading.
• This is actually deceptively difficult to analyze, so
knowing that basic definition is enough for our
purposes.

9. The Relevance Maxim
• Imagine a speaker says,
“What did you eat for
breakfast?” And the second
speaker responds, “Once a
bird flew into our house
through an open window!”
• IRRELEVANT!

10. The Relevance Maxim (Cont.)
• That’s a ridiculous example, but it illustrates just how much we have internalized the importance
of providing answers that are relevant to the conversation at hand.
• Still, we tend to violate this fairly often. Think how many meetings might be delayed because
someone couldn’t stay on topic, or created a false equivalency between topics?
• This is also fun to think about in terms of how a child learns to speak felicitously. My experience
has been that children violate the relevance maxim often without knowing or caring!

11. The Manner Maxim
• This is a fun one. The textbook says speakers should be “brief, clear,
nonambiguous, and orderly” (Ariel, How Languages Work, 199). Let’s explore
brevity and orderliness more!

12. The Manner Maxim: Be Brief
• You might think of the previous example in the “Quantity” maxim… the speaker
who shared in excruciating detail the story of their ancestors.
• BUT, brevity really refers to our sense that we need to delete extraneous words
from our answer.

13. The Manner Maxim: Be Brief (Cont.)
• Imagine I leave for a semester abroad and ask a
friend to take care of my houseplants. I tell my
friend: “My pothos needs to be trimmed.”
• If my friend knows what a pothos is and how to
trim it, that’s all the information they need
(Quantity).
• MANNER, though, especially brevity, is the reason
why, if I only have one pothos, I don’t say, “My
green-leaved, long hanging pothos needs to be
trimmed.”
• Do you kind of see that?? Manner-Brevity is how I
know that the extra adjectives are unnecessary.

14. The Manner Maxim: Be Orderly
• To say, “The sky blue makes me happy” is infelicitous. Not only does it break the
syntactic patterns of English, but it also violates my commitment to being orderly
in conversations.
• More on this soon!

15. FLOUTING MAXIMS
• Flouting maxims is one of my favorite aspects of language!
• Sometimes, speakers intentionally violate the maxims. Or, they provide
infelicitous responses to accomplish a specific conversational goal.
• Flouting is very different from not knowing conversational maxims!
Flouting is deliberate.

16. Why flout?
Flouting maxims
allows us to infuse
our language use
with wit,
implicature, humor,
art, etc.

17. Flouting the Quantity Maxim
• Here is what it might look like for a speaker to intentionally not provide the amount of
information necessary.
• Q: “How was the date??”
• A: “Well, I went on it.”
• See how the language itself doesn’t tell us what we need to know, but the context – and
the deliberate withholding – implies that the date wasn’t that great.

18. Flouting the Manner Maxim
• Think of my earlier example: “The sky blue makes me happy.” This isn’t orderly. BUT, you
English teachers might appreciate how violating orderliness is fundamental to some of
our great art forms and artistic movements!
• What about those old poems that rupture the rules of syntax for artistic effect, or to
create rhythm??
• “The sky, blue, a happy man of me makes.” I’d never say that in conversation! But I would
if I were one of Shakespeare’s characters!
• Much stream of consciousness writing or postmodern literature may also make such
violations (alongside deliberate omission of punctuation, etc.), emphasizing how
conversational rules don’t apply when we’re trapped with our own thoughts!!

19. Now you flout!
• Try this out!! Watch a show or read a book.
It’s especially easy to recognize flouting in
comedy at first, but SO much of
conversation depends on speakers’ ability to
flout maxims. Can you find any examples??

20. Image Credits
• https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-people-
having-conversation-3184285/
• https://www.wallpaperflare.com/questions-and-
doubts-advice-answer-ask-assistance-business-
wallpaper-aeccv
• http://www.tablespace.net/maps/index.html
• https://pixabay.com/photos/trolley-boxes-moving-
delivery-box-2582490/
• https://pixabay.com/photos/trolley-boxes-moving-
delivery-box-2582490/
• https://www.pxfuel.com/en/search?q=sparrow+flying
• https://www.flickr.com/photos/amandica/3523063985

21. Pragmatics 2 of 2.
Engl 241, UI, Spring ‘20
Professor Brian Malone