Shovak O. I. Fundamentals of the Theory of Speech Communication

Avoid ambiguity.

Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).

Be orderly.

8. 
   Grice demonstrates that conversational participants convey meanings beyond that which is said if they assume that the other is adhering to the cooperative principle and its maxims. Conversationalists can deal with the maxims in several ways: they can follow them, violate one of them, opt out of one of them, sacrifice one to the other if they clash, or flout them. Lying, for example, violates the maxim of quality. The maxims derive their explanatory power from what happens when behavior appears not to conform to them. Thus, as Green (1989) explains, since speakers assume that hearers adopt the cooperative principle and its maxims for interpreting speech behavior, the speaker is free to exploit it, and to speak in such a way that his behavior must be interpreted according to it. If the speaker's remark seems irrelevant, the hearer will attempt to construct a sequence of inferences that make it relevant or at least cooperative. This exploitation of the maxims is the basic mechanism by which utterances are used to convey more than they literally denote, and Grice called it implicature. Other scholars have refined Grice's approach. Sperber and Wilson, for instance, have reduced the Gricean framework to relevance. Time limitations prevent the summation of their views here.
   

3. 
   b. Meaning based on intention
   

Before proceeding to presuppositions, it is worth noting that Grice also proposed a notion of meaning based on intention that further helps account for how different or more information can be communicated than is literally said. Grice describes his notion of intentional communication as non-natural meaning, or meanings, characterizing it as follows, with "S" standing for speaker, "H" for hearer, "uttering U" for the utterance of a linguistic token, and "z" for roughly some belief or volition invoked in H:
S meant„„ z by uttering U if and only if:

1. 
   S intended U to cause some effect z in recipient H
   
2. 
   S intented (i) to be achieved simply by H recognizing the intention (i).
   

The above characterization by Grice states, according to Levinson (1983), that communication consists in the speaker intending to cause the hearer to think or do something just by getting the hearer to recognize that the speaker is trying to cause that thought or action. Other issues and problems aside, Grice's theory can explain the difference between what is literally said and what is conveyed through intention. For example, "mathematics is fascinating" said ironically may be intended, despite its literal meaning, to communicate that "mathematics is rather boring" and to produce the effect that the speaker stops talking about mathematics.