Cooperating with Grice: a cross-disciplinary metaperspective on uses of Grice's cooperative principle

Abstract

This essay proposes a tripartite metaperspective of discourse study: discourse may be studied as utterance, social interaction, or social context. Once established, the metaperspective is used to survey uses and critiques of Grice's Cooperative Principle (CP) across several fields (e.g., linguistic philosophy, gender studies, teacher research). The scholarship surveyed illustrates the widespread impact the Cooperative Principle has had on a range of scholarly activity, from work interested in the narrowest issues of language meaning to work interested in the broadest questions of the social context of human communication. The survey demonstrates that scholars who study discourse as utterance are most interested in the CP's maxims and conversational implicature, while they critique the notion of a general cooperative principle; scholars who study discourse as social interaction are more critical of the maxims. Scholars who approach the CP from more than one perspective are more likely to find the CP most useful. The essay concludes that no articulation of how the CP could consistently describe discourse as utterance, social interaction, and social context exists, but such an articulation could answer critiques of the CP, open the concept for greater cross-disciplinary use and provide new vocabulary for describing discourse. For this author's attempt to articulate a multi-perspectival version of Grice's CP, see his ‘What Exactly is Cooperative in Grice's Cooperative Principle? A Sophisticated Rearticulation of the CP’ to appear in RASK, International Journal of Language and Communication, Volume 14 (in print, 2001).