Communication As A Pragmatic Action: Evidence From Grice’s Cooperative Principle

In very general terms, the understanding of how people communicate effectively has increased since pragmatics has become part of linguistics. Grice (1975) is one of those who has been interested in identifying the reasons behind successful conversations. He assumes 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. These principles are the cooperative principle and the four maxims. They are used to understand how people communicate and to see why and when they are uncooperative. He argues that a generated implicature is one result of non observances of the cooperative principle and the four maxims. Therefore, this chapter deals with those notions in detail, and provides concrete examples of how people manage their conversations in relation to them. The aim of the present work is twofold: - To review Grice (1975) principles including the cooperative principle and the four maxims - To apply the above parameters on the Algerian context, to gauge its plausibility and feasibility.