Introduction
When people are involved in communication, they will cooperate with each other. In most circumstances, the assumption of cooperation is so pervasive so that it can be stated as a cooperative principle of conversation. Furthermore, Yule (1996: 37) states that cooperative principle suggests the speaker makes his/her conversational contribution as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which s/he engaged.
Grice says that when we communicate we assume, without realising it, that we, and the people we are talking to, will be conversationally cooperative - we will cooperate to achieve mutual conversational ends. This conversational cooperation even works when we are not being cooperative socially. So, for example, we can be arguing with one another angrily and yet we will still cooperate quite a lot conversationally to achieve the argument. This conversational cooperation manifests itself, according to Grice, in a number of conversational MAXIMS, as he calls them, which we feel the need to abide by. These maxims look at first sight like rules, but they appear to be broken more often than grammatical or phonological rules are, for example, as we will see later, and this is why Grice uses the term 'maxim' rather than 'rule'. Here are the four maxims (there may well be more) which Grice says we all try to adhere to in conversation.
