Page 53 - The Language of Humour

40 THE SHOCK OF THE NEW
Quantity
Give the right amount of information.
Make it as informative as possible.
Do not give more information than required.
Quality
Try to make it true.
Do not say what you believe to be false.
Do not say something for which you do not have enough
evidence.
Relation

Be relevant
Manner
Be clear.
Avoid obscurity of expression.
Avoid ambiguity.
Be brief.
Be orderly.

In the following example the first speaker does not give enough
information by using the term ‘woman’ (maxim of quantity) and so
allows an ambiguity, i.e. could be ‘another woman’ (maxim of manner)
(Clark and Clark in Leech 1974:122):
A: I saw Mr X having dinner with a woman yesterday.
B: Really? Does his wife know about it?
A: Of course she does. She was the woman he was having dinner with.
B has made a reasonable assumption that the woman was not his wife.
Grice calls this conversational implicature. Sometimes it is not
the speaker who breaks the maxims of conversation but the listener. In
the next case B makes an unreasonable assumption about the reference
of the deictic term ‘my’.
A: I didn’t sleep with my wife before we were married, did you?
B: I don’t know. What was her maiden name?

Activity with text
Comment on the ways that the co-operative principle is being broken in
the following. (No commentary follows this activity.)