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Office, E.E. Cooperative Principle. Encyclopedia. Available online: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/60031 (accessed on 09 October 2026).
Office EE. Cooperative Principle. Encyclopedia. Available at: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/60031. Accessed October 09, 2026.
Office, Encyclopedia Editorial. "Cooperative Principle" Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/60031 (accessed October 09, 2026).
Office, E.E. (2026, September 15). Cooperative Principle. In Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/60031
Office, Encyclopedia Editorial. "Cooperative Principle." Encyclopedia. Web. 15 September, 2026.
Cooperative Principle
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The cooperative principle is a pragmatic framework for explaining how participants in a conversation ordinarily make their contributions appropriate to the shared purpose and direction of the exchange [1]. It is conventionally expressed as an expectation that speakers provide contributions that are required by the conversational stage at which they occur [1]. The principle is elaborated through four categories of conversational expectations: quantity, concerning the amount of information provided; quality, concerning evidential adequacy and truthfulness; relation, concerning relevance; and manner, concerning clarity, orderliness, and avoidance of unnecessary obscurity or ambiguity [1][2]. These categories are commonly described as conversational maxims rather than as prescriptive rules of conduct [2]. The framework also accounts for cases in which an apparent departure from a maxim enables an interlocutor to infer an additional, context-dependent meaning, termed a conversational implicature [1][3]. The Cooperative Principle concerns pragmatic interpretation in interaction and does not define grammatical correctness, politeness norms, or the factual accuracy of every utterance [3].

pragmatics conversational maxims implicature discourse interpretation

References

  1. Grice, H. P. “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, Volume 3: Speech Acts; Cole, P., Morgan, J. L., Eds.; Academic Press: New York: NY, USA, 1975; pp. 41–58.
  2. Huang, Y. . Pragmatics, 2nd ed.; Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2017.
  3. Stephen C. Levinson. Pragmatics; Cambridge University Press (CUP): Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1983. [CrossRef]
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