Cooperative Principle

What is implied can be, and often is, ´strategically manipulated´ with (the s.c.  strategic avoidance of expliciteness, Verschueren 1999), if not for outright lying, then certainly for attaining our goals in mundane conversational encounters. The  conversational implicature was proposed (H.P.Grice) as a rational model guiding conversational interaction. Better known as the Cooperative Principle (CP), it includes four conversational maxims: quantity, quality, relation, manner  (Sperber and Wilson 1986 in their Relevance Theory superimpose the principle of  relevance  over other maxims). Although presupposed to be adhered to by the participants, the maxims are often deliberately flouted, e.g., in phatic or small talk (quantity), ´white lies´ (quality), humour, irony, teasing, banter, puns (manner), topic shift, seemingly irrelevant remarks whose relevance is implied and may only be disclosed by inference (relation). Some  tropes (figures of speech) are  built on the breach of CP:  hyperbole(exaggeration: to wait an eternity), litotes (understatement, esp. that in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of its contrary: not bad at all), tautology (repetition: War is war, and there will be losers), paraphrase, euphemism, metaphor and esp. irony (conveys a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning: How nice! said after someone´s  I failed another exam). The maxims of CP are succesfully applied in literary stylistics, for example in order to draw ´pragmatic portraits´ of fictional heroes (Leech 1992, Ferenčík 1999b).