On Grice's Theory of Conversation*

Abstract

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 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 machinery, it seems no exaggeration to say that most recent theories of utterance-interpretation are a direct result of Grice's William James Lectures. 3