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Cooperative Principle

SEMANTICS: Principle, proposed in Grice (1975), which speakers can be expected to observe in a discourse, as part of a rational and purposeful exchange of information: ‘Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.’ (p. 45) Grice elaborated this principle in four Maxims (of Quality, Quantity, Relevance and Manner) and used it to explain conversational implicatures. EXAMPLE:

A: I am out of petrol.
B: There is a garage around the corner
Under the assumption of cooperativity, B can implicate something about the garage beyond what he only literally says, namely that the garage will provide A with the petrol he needs.
LIT. Grice, H.P. (1975)