Had quite an interesting discussion regarding Gricean pragmatics this morning and had me thinking about . It’s funny how all of these theories and books can be filtered down and summarized to just a few of their core sections. With H.P. Grice, many linguistics majors just remember him with his Co-operative Principle.

In a nutshell, the idea goes that to achieve mutual understanding in a conversation, communicators often follow abide by four maxims and these are:

• Quantity – be informative
• Quality – be truthful
• Relation – be relevant
• Manner – be clear and concise

The thing is, reality has it that even by flouting (breaking) these maxims, we are able to achieve creating all sorts of meaning and to some extent a mutual understanding because of our ability to interpret conversational implicatures. Sarcasm for example (though we have to admit that not all people are “sensitive” enough to interpret this).

As far as online discourse go, many constantly flout most if not all of these maxims (some all at once). Take social media and blogging for example. How much information do we convey to our audience? How truthful are we? How relevant is our message? How clear and concise are these messages? Survey the statuses of friends on Facebook or people’s tweets and you’d struggle to make sense of most of them. And still, the Web thrives with our discourses.

Sure there are quite a lot of cases of misunderstanding because of varying interpretations but we just have to deal with understanding’s evil twin.

Check out these other posts:

1. Another take on prescriptivism
2. On English, prescriptivism, Filipinos, and the Internet
3. Why bother with Internet Data?
4. Cons and asses
5. How do we define ‘authority’ in blogging?