Coordinating Conversational Moves

In his discussion of the cooperative principle and conversational maxims, H. P. Grice has described the most basic and simple of the conventions that guide talk. The cooperative principle asserts that for talk to work, communicators must be willing to cooperate with one another by speaking in socially approved ways. To cooperate, they must follow four conversational maxims, or rules.

First, they must make sure their contributions con­tain enough, but not too much, information. This is the quantity maxim. Second, speakers must be truthful. If they say something patently absurd, they violate the quality maxim. Speakers must also be sure their contributions are direct and pertinent; otherwise, they fail to follow the relevancy maxim. Finally, speakers should follow the manner maxim; they should be direct and clear. When communicators don’t follow these rules, con­versation becomes impossible. No one can carry on a conversation with some­one who has no regard for truth or relevance, whose style is unclear, and who has no concept of an appropriate amount of talk.

This does not mean that maxims are never violated, however. Sometimes we violate a maxim intentionally to send an indirect message. If, for example, Harry asks Sally a personal question and she responds, “Nice weather,” her vio­lation of the relevancy maxim probably means that she finds Harry’s question too personal. If he’s sensitive to pragmatic rules, he understands her indirect meaning and has the good grace to change the subject. In this example, inter­preting Sally’s meaning is complex, for her meaning is not just in her words but in the fact that she purposefully violates a conversational maxim. What lesson can we draw from Grice’s analysis? It suggests that to make sense, communicators must act cooperatively; when they fail to do so by violating conversational conventions, meaning is affected.

An important factor is that conversation is sequential. For conversation to work, each move must follow the previous move and must fit into the overall conversation. This means that communicators must keep track of what is going on as they talk and must build off others’ contributions without losing sight of their conversa­tional goals. Communicators must know when it is time to make a conversational move. In conversa­tion, knowing whose turn it is can be tricky. In formal classroom discourse, the convention of raising your hand helps regulate turn taking. In informal conver­sations, communicators must rely on subtle linguistic and nonverbal cues that indicate whether one speaker wants to continue or is relinquishing a turn. Al­though conversational turns commonly overlap a bit, true interruptions are so­cial blunders that are often read as attempts to dominate.