Grice's Style

Speranza

Grice's "Logic and Conversation" is one of the classics of modern philosophy and linguistics. Grice’s 4 maxims (knownas the “Gricean Maxims”) and the Cooperative Principle more or less sparked an entire subfieldof linguistics: pragmatics. 
Before this, we did not have a systematic way to study conversationsin context. Since then, however, Gricean Maxims have been the foundation of how to studyspeech in context. There has been a lot of debate about whether the maxims are the same inevery language, how many there should be, and other things. Nevertheless, the GriceanMaxims still stand today as some of the standard ideas in linguistics.The language of this paper can be difficult. Grice uses very dense language: some of the wordsare from philosophy (like “explication”), others are old, formal English (like “prolixity”), andothers are British terms (like “shove off”). Please keep this reading guide handy as you read thearticle. If you don’t understand all the terms, that’s okay. Do your best to be able to answer allthe questions in this guide.