grices theory Essay

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In this essay I will be analysing Grice’s theory and giving a brief sketch of Grice’s approach and point out various problems with it. I will then be looking into how different the relevance theory is to Grice’s theory of conversation, and illustrate these differences with examples, and I will then sum up whether I think the relevance theory account is an improvement of that of Grice’s approach. Grice’s theory of conversation distinguishes the output of what is said, and what is implicated, an example of this could be “Some of the boys came to the party”, however the implicated meaning of the sentence is that not all of the boys came to the party. Conversation is governed by a set of principles these then spell out how the rational agents behave in order to make language use efficient. Grice had also came up with maxims, the maxim of quality, quantity, and manner. The maxim of quality was not to say something that you believe to be false, and do not say something which you lack adequate evidence for. The maxim of quantity however was to make your contribution to the conversation as informative as is required for the current talk exchange, and to not make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary. The maxim of order then is defined as to avoid obscurity, avoid ambiguity, and be brief, and use an order of conversation. Grice’s theory of conversational implicature provides an account of how it is possible for a sentence to mean more than what is literally expressed by the conversational sense of the linguistic expressions uttered. Using this theory we are able to infer the speaker’s real intention. The way in which a sentence is said can determine the truth behind the sentence, we could say that when a sentence is stated ironically, it is at times quite misleading of what we should understand of the sentence. The details of the utterance
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