Language communication in a pragmatic perspective: Flouting the cooperative principle

The aim of the article is a pragmatic analysis of various linguistic communication situations in the light of Grice’s principle of cooperation (1975). The analysis shows that language strategies involve a deliberate flouting of the cooperative principle using various pragmatic functions. The presented communication strategies in English, German, Polish and Russian show similarities in their occurrence. The sender may convey intentions not directly, but by hidden means of expression which often become an exponent of an apparent question, a change in the argumentative direction, the use of ambiguous words, irony or even silence. Hence, we can talk about the implementation of the pragmatic functions of “language avoidance”, “counter-argumentation”, “counter-proposal”, “irony” etc.


Introduction
One of the most important issues of intercultural exchange is language communication. In this paper, this problem is presented from the pragmalinguistic point of view. Linguistic pragmatics proposes a synthetic approach towards the use of language. It combines not only the knowledge of linguistics but also that of other disciplines, such as philosophy of language, psychology, sociology, ethnography etc.
From the point of view of pragmalinguistics, language communication is described not statically but dynamically, that is, as speech acts in which "the meaning of the word is realized in its usage" (Wittgenstein 1958, Komorowska 2010. The fundamental role of language communication implies both a speaker and recipients (one or more). The pragmalinguistic analysis is based on the theory of the act of speech with the following components: Locution, Illocution and Perlocution.
In this paper, we understand these terms following Austin (1962) and : locution as content, illocution as the actual speech act and perlocution as a strategy of speaking influencing the receiver. I propose the following definition: "A speech act is a deliberate communicative action expressing the intention of the sender in order to realize the pragmatic meaning of the utterance".
Although the illustrative examples come from four languages: English, German, Polish and Russian, this paper does not aim at any comparative or contrastive analysis. However, the examples demonstrate that the pragmatic phenomena we concentrate on are similar in these two Germanic and two Slavic languages -which is obvious in the case of related languages and cultural proximity.

Contextualization and illocution
A pragmatic interpretation of a speech act should take into consideration both verbal and non-verbal context. The following utterance exemplifies verbal context: Close the door, please. Nonverbal context specifies time, place, social relations between people etc. In the course of explaining the pragmalinguistic meaning, the fundamental issue is the process of contextualization which is closely related to life situations. In the example Close the door, please, its context tells us that the utterance takes place in a room with a door, that there is a person who is ready to respond to the request, and that there is some social interdependence between them which enables one of them to ask a favour and the other to react to it (Awdiejew 1987 Indirect speech acts -requests: (2) English: I hate drafts.
A particular utterance may have different interpretations, as in the following example: (3) I like paintings It may be understood in a number of ways, such as: When participants of a conversation pass by a gallery, one of them makes a proposal which means 'Let's go in for a while'. A thief at a police station makes an excuse: I'm not guilty, I just love paintings. When asked by a friend what present a person would like to receive on their birthday, the person asked provides a preference. When a person takes a painting down from a wall, and their spouse makes a request meaning 'Don't take it down because I like it'.
Illocution in indirect speech acts may be illustrated by the following examples with sham questions. (Komorowska 1995). The utterances in these contexts are not real questions, they contain hidden illocutionary force. An apparent question becomes an exponent of the illocution of warning the addressee not to cross the street when it is dangerous. A verbal warning may be accompanied by non-verbal behavior such as preventing the addressee from crossing the street.
The sender expresses disapproval of the interlocutor's hairstyle by choosing a strategy involving a question. The illocution of criticism will be strengthened by an ironic intonation or a disapproving facial expression.
The apparent question expresses an illocution of criticism in connection with, for example, alcohol abuse by the interlocutor. In this linguistic situation, the sender uses a question to reinforce the intention of persuading the addressee to stop acting in a certain way -in this case, drinking to excess. The sender makes it clear to the addressee that he or she intends to stop being friends with him or her and the reason is the situation which has occurred. The strategic use of the question as an exponent of illocution additionally strengthens the sender's decision-making power and constitutes a kind of objection to the behaviour of the addressee's who, from that moment on, became unworthy of friendship.
The illocution of the given utterances is the sender's advice to give another person a specific object. So, these utterances could be explained as 'give him what he wants, you don't need it anyway, and it is important to him'.
The question becomes an exponent of aggression towards the addressee and expresses an illocution of dissatisfaction, criticism and accusation as the addressee is attacked for their decision to come. It can be guessed that the dissatisfaction with their arrival results from presuppositional knowledge, e.g. it is related to the addressee's behaviour, assessed negatively by the sender.
In this context, the question becomes an exponent of criticizing the addressee for being late. The strategic use of the interrogative structure may be strengthened by an ironic intonation, as well as by a facial expression. The question becomes an exponent of the illocution of a reminder to the addressee that his or her behaviour is not acceptable for the sender and raises an objection. Additionally, the illocution may contextually be reinforced by the intonation of impatience and other non-verbal means of expression.
The sender, guided by the presuppositional knowledge of the given situation, wants to persuade the addressee to visit his or her mother. Thus, the apparent question becomes an exponent of the illocution of counsel, which can be explicated as 'Having certain information, I advise you to visit your mother'.

The Cooperative Principle, implicature and presupposition
It is worth recalling the ideas of Grice and other scholars which include conversational implicature, presupposition and the Cooperative Principle. Grice (1975) describes what implicature is by giving a number of illustrative examples. Davis (2019) provides a concise definition of this phenomenon: "Implicature" denotes either (i) the act of meaning or implying one thing by saying something else, or (ii) the object of that act. Implicatures can be determined by sentence meaning or by conversational context, and can be conventional (in different senses) or unconventional.
As regards the Cooperative Principle, following Kant, Grice (1975: 45) distinguishes four categories within it: Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner. The category of quantity relates to two maxims: 1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). 2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. (Grice 1975: 45) The category of quality concerns telling the truth (with the supermaxim: "Try to make your contribution one that is true" -Grice 1975: 46) and includes the following maxims: 1. Do not say what you believe is false. 2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. (Grice 1975: 46) The category of relation calls for relevance ("Be relevant" -Grice 1975: 46), and the category of manner concerns not what is said (as the other categories do), but how it is said (Grice 1975: 46). The supermaxim "Be perspicuous" includes the following maxims: 3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). 4. Be orderly. (Grice 1975: 46) Grice (1975: 47) mentions other maxims, including the maxim of politeness which concerns observing the needs of other people, avoiding bothering or criticizing them, avoiding showing off, expressing gratitude etc. (see, among others, Brown and Levinson 1994, Ożóg 1990, Marcjanik 2007, Marcjanik ed. 2005.
It should be stated that deciphering implicature is possible due to: presuppositions, i.e. conventional implicatures; presumption or anticipation.
Presupposition may be understood in many different ways. For instance, Beaver and Geurts (2014) give it the following definition: "the phenomenon whereby speakers mark linguistically the information that is presupposed or taken for granted, rather than being part of the main propositional content of a speech act".
This paper adopts the view on presupposition proposed by Ducrot (1972). Presuppositions, according to him, are facts given to speakers before a particular speech act. In the following example, (13) A: Yesterday I met Jane.
B: When did she come back from Paris? the presupposition is that Jane stayed in Paris. The sphere of anticipation, whether real anticipation or presumption, has its analogy in the sphere of cooperation and it is not an act of speech. For example, for the category of quality when Speaker A wants Speaker B's help, Speaker A assumes that B's contribution will be real, not feigned, and -depending on the situation -that if B is asked to help A to make cake and A says he/she needs sugar, A does not expect B to pass him/her salt, or if A asks B for bread, A does not expect to receive anything else (Grice 1975).

Obeying the rules
In fact, speakers of the same language and participants in the same speech community tend to obey similar rules. As Levinson (1983: 101) points out, Grice's theory, in which he develops the concept of implicature, is essentially a theory about how people use language. Grice's suggestion is that there is a set of over-arching assumptions guiding the conduct of conversation. These arise, it seems, from basic rational considerations and may be formulated as guidelines for the efficient and effective use of language in conversation to further co-operative ends.
In language communication, people either observe these guidelines (maxims of conversation, which have been presented - Grice 1975) or flout them. They may still obey the maxims of conversation by giving indirect answers. Let us consider the following examples.
A is standing at a car and B is heading toward A. In their conversation (14), B implies that there is an open gas station, so A can buy gas there.
(14) A: I ran out of gasoline.
B: There is a gas station around the corner.

Breaking the rules
Breaking Grice's postulates may involve elusive responses, refusal to continue the topic (pretending not to know the answer and pausing), counterproposals, counterarguments and irony.
In the analysis below, I distinguish various communication strategies aimed at conveying the sender's hidden intentions and I propose explications in the form of a pragmatic framework. The pragmatic frame is understood here as a pragmatic explication of a given communication situation based on presuppositional knowledge.

Elusive responses
Elusive responses can be presented as follows: "For some subjective reason I do not want to make my speech clear, so I use an elusive response" (Komorowska 1996b In (16), B uses an elusive response. The laconic answer meaning 'not quite' can be understood in different ways: B is not married, but he/she is going to marry soon; B is not married, but he/she lives with somebody; B is married, but is now separated from his/her spouse; B is married, but he/she and his/her spouse live separately; B is married, but his/her spouse is not home now etc. (Komorowska 1996b: 169) Considering (16) in terms of the Cooperative Principle, we may observe that B fails to conform to the category of quantity (in not giving as much information as is required) and the category of manner (in giving an obscure answer).

Refusal to continue the topic: Pretending not to know the answer and pausing
These strategies are underlined by the following approach: "I do not want to talk about it, do not ask me anything else".  (17), for some reason, B does not want to continue discussing a certain topic. To indicate the refusal, speakers may use not only the phrases meaning 'I don't know', but also phrases meaning 'It's none of my business' (e.g. Polish To nie moja sprawa 'It is not my business', Nie obchodzi mnie to 'I don't care about it'). If B actually knows the answer to A's question, he or she flouts the category of quality (not telling the truth), as well as the maxim of politeness (Komorowska 1996b: 170).

In all the examples in
Reluctance to answer a question in a conversation may also manifest itself as a moment of silence, e.g. Lack of any answer (silence), meant to avoid continuing a particular topic in a conversation -similar to refusal (Rokoszowa 1999) -is also flouting the maxim of politeness.

Counterproposals
Counterproposals are connected with changing the topic of a conversation. From the point of view of one of the interlocutors, they may be described as follows: "Do not ask me anymore, because I do not want to answer, let us change the subject". (Komorowska 1995: 107). Let us quote the following example coming from a conversation in English: In (20), B clearly rejects the topic of the conversation proposed by A. It is not pleasant for him. For some reason, B does not want to answer A's question, and instead, changes the topic, which is actually a new proposal: "Let us talk about the weather". Let us consider an example found in a conversation in the four languages. As can easily be seen, in (20) and (21), by changing the topic of the conversation, B flouts the rule "Be relevant".

Counterarguments
Counterarguments resemble counterproposals, but there is a difference between them. One speaker answers a question indirectly, so the response does not exclude the topic of the conversation. Still, the speaker wants to shift his or her interlocutor's attention: "You, for sure, understand the necessary implicature that ... and that I am trying to direct your attention to another topic" (Komorowska 1995, Antas 2008. In the following examples: The attention is redirected from the pupil's lack of knowledge to his behaviour which may be considered amusing or -more probably -impudent by the teacher.
Also in the case of requests, speakers may give indirect answers, which enable the shift of attention from A's problems to B's, e.g.

Irony
The pragmatic function of irony is to break the rules of the categories of Quality and Quantity. A speaker bluntly tells a lie.
The following pragmatic frame is typical of irony: "I tell a lie on purpose because I want to prove that...". The English conversation in (25)  Examples (25) and (26) involve presuppositions: in (25) A knows that Mark has bad manners and does not help other people, and in (26) A is aware of the fact that Alexandra is not hospitable at all. In some cases, irony is made explicit by adding an additional comment, e.g.
(27) English: You are so smart, keep on… but this will get you nowhere. German: Mach nur so weiter, Du wirst schon sehen, was Du davon hast...
(28) English: You are as pretty as a Hollywood actressat the age of 70.
Irony may also involve breaking the category of Quantity, which is connected with the use of litotes (understatements). For instance, one can make the following comment in Polish (and in the other languages as well) about a man who was furious for some reason and broke all the furniture in his house (Grice 1975): (29) English: He got a bit irritated.

Conclusion
The conducted pragmatic analysis of various linguistic communication situations demonstrates that the language strategy can involve flouting the cooperative principle with the use of various pragmatic functions. Tracing the communication strategies in English, German, Polish and Russian shows the similarities in their use. The sender may convey intentions indirectly, employing hidden means of expression whose exponent is an apparent question, a change in argumentative direction, the use of ambiguous words, irony or even silence. Hence, we deal with the realization of the pragmatic functions of "language avoidance", "counter-argumentation", "counter-proposal", "irony" etc.