Speaker activity and Grice's maxims of conversation at the interface of Pragmatics and Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

This paper attempts to show that a cognitive perspective of the Gricean concept on the conversational maxims opens new perspectives on two problems which have not been dealt with in detail in the original model and in most successive work on conversational implicature: speaker activity and a cognitive underpinning of the maxims of conversation. As pinpointed in section, the first problem is the need for a shift in focus towards the actual production of linguistic utterances fulfilling or flouting the maxims in particularized conversational implicature. The second problem is explaining how the adherence or non-adherence to the maxims can be conceptually accounted for on the basis of some general cognitive principles. While section is devoted to a cognitive re-evaluation of the speaker's perspective, section will discuss some recent pragmatic developments, such as Levinson's notion of pragmatic marking in generalized implicature, which can be applied to particularized conversational implicature and fruitfully underpinned by more general cognitive principles. Section will present an outline of some basic cognitive principles involved when speakers fulfill or flout the maxims. In the course of the paper it becomes clear that both current pragmatic research and cognitive analysis contribute to a new understanding of Grice's ideas.