A Survey of Infringements of Gricean Maxims in Some Precautionary Inscriptions on Medicine Packets

In communication, participants are expected to cooperate through observing a set of maxims. Nevertheless, some communicative instances reveal that there are cases of unintentional non-observance of the maxims, which Grice (1975) categorized as “infringing a maxim”. These instances of infringements call for attention to the extent that they could cause breakdown in communication. In this regard, the aim of this paper is to investigate some cases of infringements of the maxims in selected precautionary inscriptions on some medicine packets, with the objective to examine how such messages are interpreted. The theoretical framework adopted for this research is based on Gricean pragmatics. The method for this research is qualitative and its paradigm is interpretive. The data were collected from some packets of medicine sold in some pharmacy shops in Lagos, Nigeria. One of the major observations made in the course of this research is that, out of the four classes of the Gricean maxims, only the maxim of quality was not infringed in any precautionary inscription in the data. This result may be justified by the reason that precautionary inscriptions on medicine packets should be carefully couched in truth, so as not to jeopardize the health of the patients. Further studies on various cases of infringements in diverse aspects of communication are strongly recommended. Keywords: Precautionary Inscriptions; Communication; Pragmatics; Maxims; Infringements

Uncertainty and conjunction fallacies

This chapter examines conjunction fallacies. This phenomenon is a topic in the psychology of reasoning and is not strictly linguistic, but it is related to pragmatics. Monads are shown to capture conjunction fallacies compositionally, which has eluded prominent prior theories. The chapter contrasts a monad built around the probability semiring with one built around a simpler semiring, the one semiring. The choice between the probability and one semirings partially predicts experimental participants’ behaviour. This points to an explanation in terms of the satisficing heuristic, rather than the representativeness heuristic. The chapter explores two options for fully predicting the results. The first is to use Gricean pragmatics in addition to the one semiring. The second is to use alternative underlying semirings for the monad: tropical semirings. This alternative compositional solution achieves a highly satisfying fit with aggregate psychological data and preserves an interesting duality between the logical operations of conjunction and disjunction. Some exercises are provided to aid understanding.

Pragmatics and Language Teaching

The main goal of language teaching is that at the end of the period of learning, the learners should be able to communicate in that language effectively. The main source of language is language use. The students must therefore be given plenty of opportunity to use the language. This is where the principles of pragmatics come into language teaching. Pragmatics provides ample opportunities for the students to learn English language communicatively and practically. In this study, I shall focus particularly on the application of pragmatics to language teaching with emphasis on Gricean pragmatics and Searle’s speech acts. The question of why pragmatics should be assigned a more prominent place in language teaching syllabus is also sufficiently and adequately addressed.

A cognitive-pragmatic study of non-scalar implicatures

Whether or not non-entailment relations generate scalar implicatures is a cutting-edge issue in linguistic pragmatics. The present study intends to argue that, based on the Cognitive Grammar paradigm, non-scalar implicatures generated by non-entailment relations are manifested as cognitive defaults which are conventionally incorporated into symbolic units in schema-instance complexes. Conventions provide a shortcut for the hearer to infer non-scalar implicatures in an unconscious, effortless and automatic way. We maintain that, contrary to neo-Gricean pragmatics, non-entailment relations cannot generate (scalar) Q-implicatures.

How to be Brief: Children’s and Adults’ Application of Grice’s Brevity Maxim in Production

The brevity maxim of Gricean pragmatics states that unnecessary prolixity should be avoided. We report a case in which 5-year-old children’s performance conforms better to Grice’s maxim than adults’ behavior. Our data come from a semi-spontaneous German relative clause production study that we carried out with 5- and 7-year-old children as well as adults. In particular, we focus on the pragmatics of the passive predicates that were produced. These constituted about a third of both child and adult productions in items that targeted an object relative clause structure. Since the expression of the agent is syntactically optional with passive predicates, the brevity maxim predicts that the agent should only be expressed when it is informative. We compare two conditions to test this prediction: one where the agent is informative and one where it is not. We find that 5-year-old children display significantly greater sensitivity to the brevity maxim than adults do. In two follow-up studies, we show that adults’ violations of brevity cannot be explained by priming of by-phrases expressing the agent and that there is an effect of age within children as well.

GP and NCP

Despite its theoretical significance, Paul Grice’s CP, as the heart of classic and neo-Gricean pragmatics, has been a bone of contention for the last four decades for both Western and Eastern scholarship. This study addresses the contribution of four Chinese pragmaticians to the anti-CP principles: Guanlian Qian, Meizhen Liao, and Yameng Liu and Chunshen Zhu, focusing on the latter two. We briefly discuss Liao’s Goal Principle (GP) and Liu and Zhu’s Non-Cooperative Principle (NCP), which challenge Grice’s CP head-on. It points out that Liao’s GP is loaded with neo-Gricean pragmatic value as an alternative interpretation of CP but is not deemed “more applicable” as they claim, and that the NCP of Liu and Zhu, based on their CP query, sheds some light on neo-Gricean pragmatics and rhetoric, and yet calls for suspicion of their NCP as an “antistrophos/counterpart rhetoric-principle.” We maintain that cooperation in CP suggests pragma-philosophical cooperativeness or cooperationality between rational humans and that it applies to pragmatics and rhetoric alike, as well as to forensic, daily, and rhetorical utterances. It seems that so-called “non-cooperation in cooperation” or “cooperation in non-cooperation” is only logico-semantic non-cooperation, deeply rooted in the soil of pragma-philosophical cooperativeness or cooperationality.

Lying, Metaphor, and Hyperbole

Both metaphor and hyperbole are akin to lying in saying something that is strictly speaking false (i.e., exhibits no world–word fit) and thus have deceptive potential. How close or distant the relationship metaphor/hyperbole versus lie is seen to be depends on the theoretical approach taken, which is illustrated by brief treatments of classical rhetoric, philosophy, Gricean pragmatics, relevance theory, and cognitive linguistics. From a functional perspective the overlap between metaphor/hyperbole and lying may be small, but nevertheless is present in various politeness functions of hyperbole and in using metaphors for reconceptualization and (euphemistic) disguising. Depending on the forms and contexts chosen, the distinction between hyperbole/metaphor and lying might be blurred or sharpened. The former is found, e.g., by diminishing the recognizability of the contrast between literal and non-literal forms in hyperbole, while the latter happens in case of extreme flouts or metalinguistic marking, which is possible for hyperbole/metaphors but not for lies.