2022/04/06 by Deirdre Wilson, Dan Sperber
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Discourse Analysis in Language Studies #Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition
paper · doi:10.4324/9781003291039-11
openalex publication_date 2022/04/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
It is now ten years since Paul Grice, in his William James Lectures, laid down the foundations for a theory of conversation. 1 Although the full text of these lectures has never been published, Grice&s;s views have had considerable influence on most recent approaches to pragmatics. Following Grice, conversation is now generally conceived of as a cooperative venture, governed by maxims of truthfulness, relevance, informativeness and manner, which may be exploited for particular conversational effects. 2 A distinction between what the speaker explicitly said and what he tacitly implied or implicated, and a classification of implicatures into various types, are now part of the standard machinery for pragmatic analysis. Although specific proposals have been made for extending, supplementing or modifying Grice&s;s machinery, it seems no exaggeration to say that most recent theories of utterance-interpretation are a direct result of Grice&s;s William James Lectures. 3