A: "Did I tell you, Graham Potter finally got this job in Glasgow?"
B: "The lobster is delicious, darling."
Flouting the maxim of relevance, B tells her husband that she definitely does not want to talk about his job or his colleagues.
A: "And then, after all we have been through, he did not notice me at all?"
B: "Oops, right at the back there is a spot on your dress"
Again flouting the maxim of relevance, B possibly warns her girlfriend that the guy she has been talking about is approaching.
A: "I could invite you for dinner tomorrow."
B:" Your girlfriend is doing well, is she?"
Flouting the third maxim, B reminds her admirer that he should be faithful.
A: "Rumour has it that you had an affair with this woman."
B: "I do not claim that this question is unjustified."
B is flouting the maxim of manner, thus indicating that there was an affair, but he does not dare to admit things.
A: "Tell me about your last match!"
B: "It came quite close to playing tennis"
B played his worst tennis and uses a flouting of the last maxim to indicate this.
2.3 The process of flouting in detail
In this section I shall take a closer look at one of my examples, making explicit the types of knowledge required for the implicatures to be worked out.
A: "Oops, did I call you too early?"
B: "Oh, I love getting up at six in the morning"
This flout exploits the maxim of quality as the speaker says something which is blatantly untrue. Assuming cooperation, the listener is forced to look for another plausible interpretation. His line of thought (as well as the speaker?s ?codification process? shortly before uttering his sentence) might work like this:
1. B has expressed pleasure at being disturbed early in the morning (utterance X)
2. But normally people in our society do not like this.
3. So why is B uttering X?
4. I cannot assume that B is violating the cooperative principle, namely he tries to deceive me.
5. I also do not think that B?s sentence is entirely pointless.
6. As 3 and 4 are not true, B must be trying to put across some other proposition
7. Is there a related meaning B?s utterance hints at?
8. In this case, the only obviously related proposition is the exact opposite of the one B has expressed.
9. Therefore the only plausible explanation is that B is quite annoyed at me calling this early.
10. I will accept this meaning unless context hints at a more persuasive interpretation
3 References
Grice, H. Paul. 1975. “Logic and conversation”. In: Cole, P. and J. Morgan (eds.).
Pragmatics. (Syntax and Semantics 9). New York: Academic Press, 41-58
Levinson, Stephen. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Mey, Jacob. 1993. Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Thomas, Jenny. 1995. Meaning and Interaction. An Introduction to Pragmatics. London:
Longman.
Yule, George. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford UP
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