Cooperative Principles: The Hedging of Maxims

Hedging is any deliberately ambiguous statement or any equivocal statement. Grundy (2000) includes hedging among other mitigating devices in his politeness marker category ‘downgraders’. He calls there devices, hedges, play-downs, understaters, downtoner, or ‘minus’ comminters.

The hedges and intensifiers are more comment on the extent to which the speakers abiding by the maxims which guide our conversational contributions than a part of what is said or conveyed. It seems that when we talk, we not only convey messages, but also frequently like to tell each other how informative, well founded, relevant, and perspicuous these messages are. Speakers frequently use highly grammaticalized hedges and intensifiers to inform their addressees of the extent to which they are abiding by the maxims. These hedges and intensifiers show that the guiding principles for talk suggested by Grice really do exist and that speakers orient reflexively to these principles as they communicate.

Levinson (1985) states that the theory of conversational implicature is a theory of language in which language is viewed as a self-contained system of rules. He further argues that there are interesting relations between structure and function of the language. Thus, the English particles such as ‘well’, ‘oh’, ‘ah’ ‘so’, ‘anyway’, ‘actually’, ‘still’, ‘after all’, are the lexical items which at time refer to the notion of conversational implicature and are being described as “maxim hedges” indication how an utterance is preface in order o make up to cooperative expectation.

Moreover, in academic speech, hedging is most appropriately described as either (a) a lack of competence commitment to the truth value of an accompanying proposition, or (b) a desire not to express that commitment categorically.

Myers (1989) groups all linguistic devices under his categories of "negative politeness and hedging, focusing less on the description of the linguistic devices themselves than on their purpose or motivation. Further, hedging is a politeness strategy when it marks a claim or any other statement as being provisional, pending acceptance in the literature, acceptance by the community-in other words, acceptance by the listeners.  He goes to point out that hedging can be realized in any different linguistics forms, and gives examples of the use of condition statements, modifiers, verb choice, framing statement that indicates the weight a statement should have or the degree of doubt involved, and even statements of personal opinion.

Quality Hedges
Brown and Levinson (1990) state that quality hedges may suggest that the speaker is not taking full responsibilities for the truth of his utterances. For instance:
          think…
I         believe…
          assume…

Or alternatively they may stress S’s commitment to the truth of his utterances; in other words, they reflect the commitment of the writer to the quality of the proposition contained in the subsequent part of the statements and do not contribute truth value to the statements as a whole. Such as, I absolutely (deny/ promise/believe) that…, others take the opposite view and say…, The issue says…, It is quite right what people say…, Some people believe that…, So you can imagine even…, In this case..., etc. Or they may disclaim the assumption that the point of S’s assertion is to inform H, such as, As you know…, As it well known…, As you and I both know…, etc.

Quantity Hedges
Quantity hedges, we find archetypal examples in these English expressions, which give notice that not as much or not as precise information is provided as might be expected, such as: roughly, more or less, approximately, give or take a few, or so, I should think, I can’t tell you more than that it’s…, to some extent, all in all, in short, basically, so to speak, etc. the assertion of personal opinion show that the information tried to be conveyed is limited.

Relevance Hedges
In Relevance hedges, we note that because of sensitivity of topic changes as impositions on H’s face, such changes are often done off record. Hedges that mark the change, and perhaps partially apologize for it, include, by the way…, oh I know…, anyway…, this may not be relevant/ appropriate/ timely but…, I might mention at this point…, while I remember…, etc.

Manner Hedges
Finally, some common Manner hedges includes, what I meant was…, more clearly…, to put it more simply…, you see, yeah?, got it?, OK?, is that clear?, see?, etc.

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See also:
Grice's cooperative principle 
Cooperative Principle: Implicature
Cooperative Principle: Flouting Maxims
The Hedging of Maxims 

Cooperative Principle: The Flouting of Maxims

The infringement of maxims which involves exploitation, that is, a procedure by which a maxim is flouted for the purpose of getting a conversational implicature, is usually carried out by means of indirect, contradictory utterances, or figure of speech such as irony, metaphor, overstatement, understatement, tautology, and hyperbole. Grundy (2000) states that whenever a maxim is flouted there must be an implicature to save the utterance from simply appearing to be a faulty contribution to a conversation.  Consider these four sentences examples taken from the previous post, Grice's Cooperative Principle:


(1)  A: What time is it?
      B: It's two a'clock, in fact it's four pass two, and now it's Sunday.


Maxim of quantity and its implicature occur when the speaker or the writer conveys messages that are not as informative as they are required or the information is too much and unnecessary. B flouts the maxim of quantity, since he gives too much information to A, while too much information can distract the listener. However, it is not very difficult to recover the implicature that B wants to show to A that he is a kind of "on time" person.


(2) A: What is the Capital City of Indonesia?
     B: I believe it's Bogor, or maybe Jakarta, Indonesia has wide territory. 


Maxim of quality and its implicature occur when your contribution one that is untrue or lack adequate evidence. B flouts the maxim of quality since he gives insincere answer for A's question. The implicature of this flouting maxim would be that B doesn't know exactly about Capital City of Indonesia.


(3) Mom: Have you done your homework?
     Son: My bicycle is broken mom. 


Maxim of relevance and its implicature arise when the speaker deviates from the particular topic being asked and discussed. The answer of the son is not answering the mother’s question. The son tries to direct his mother’s concern away from the question which she does not like. 


(4) It’s the taste


Maxims of manner and its implicature occur when the utterances are not brief, ambiguous, and obscure. Advertisements often flout the maxim of manner. The statement flouts maxim of manner because it is obscure. The utterances triggers an inference process in which the addressee looks for the likeliest that is relevant in the context that obtain – that the taste is good for people who favor Coca cola and bad for those who dislike it. 

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See also:
Grice's cooperative principle 
Cooperative Principle: Implicature
Cooperative Principle: Flouting Maxims
The Hedging of Maxims 

Cooperative Principle: The Concept of Implicature

The concept of implicature was first introduced by Grice (1975) as the answer to the meaning concern which is unable to be covered by the ordinary semantics. It is insufficient to use semantics to uncover the meaning of utterances. The inappropriateness of understanding of meaning of utterances much influences the achievement of the communication purpose. The purpose of communication is in order the massage the speaker wants to convey is accepted appropriately by the hearer. To understand precisely what is meant by the speaker in uttering the utterances in a conversation, it is very important to understand the concept of implicature.

In conversation, the utterances produced by either the speaker or hearer has explicit and implicit meaning. Explicit meaning can be understood both by predicting the semantic meaning of the words within the conversation and by understanding the syntactic structure of the language used in the conversation. In the other hand, to understand the implicit meaning in a conversation, the rules of semantics and syntactic of the language is insufficient. Therefore, the concept of implicature was introduced. According to Brown and Yule (1983) implicature is used to calculate what is suggested and meant by the speaker as a different thing from what he actually said explicitly.

Furthermore, Grice (1975) states that there are two kinds of implicature, those are: conventional implicature and conversational implicature. The difference between them is that the former depends on something other than what is truth-conditional in the conversational use, or meaning, of particular form of expression, whereas the latter derives from a set of more general principles which regulate the proper conduct of conversation.
In order to have complete understanding about the difference between conventional and conversational implicature, pay attention to the following are examples:

(i) Mary got pregnant and John was pleased
(ii) Mary got pregnant but John was pleased.

The difference between the two utterances above is in the conjunction ‘and’ and ‘but’. In (i), the conjunction used is ‘and’, thus it means that the Mary’s pregnancy makes John happy or pleased. In the other hand, in (ii), the conjunction used is ‘but ‘, which shows contradiction, thus, it can mean that Mary’s pregnancy makes John unhappy or not pleased. By understanding the different meaning between conjunction ‘and’ and ‘but’ well, therefore, the meaning of the utterances in (i) and (ii) are clearly understood since the meaning of them is exactly the same with the meaning of structure of the utterances. The above case is called conventional implicature, it is resulted from the understanding of an utterance based on the structures form of the utterance.

Conversational implicature, on the other hand, has more various meanings since understanding the meaning of the utterance much depend on the context in which the utterance occurs. The conversational implicature arises as a result of the cooperative principle violence. A conversational implicature is, therefore, something which is implied in conversation, that is, something which is left implicit in actual language use. The example of conversational implicature as follows:

A: Has John arrived?
B: There is a red car in the garage.

B’s answer for A’s question has an implicature that John usually drives a red car; B has seen that there is a red car, which John usually drives, in the garage. Therefore, B concludes that John has arrived.

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See also:
Grice's cooperative principle 
Cooperative Principle: Implicature
Cooperative Principle: Flouting Maxims
The Hedging of Maxims 

Grice's Cooperative Principle

The Gricean cooperative principle refers to the concept of the philosopher Grice about the cooperation between speakers in using the maxims. The cooperative principle makes our contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which we are engaged. Levinson (1985) states that the Gricean cooperative principle is construed as a theory of communication; it has the interesting consequence that it gives an account of how communication might be achieved in the absence of any conventional means for expressing the intended message. A corollary is that it provides an account of how more can be communicated, in his rather strict sense of non-naturally meant, than what is actually said.


In sorting out the different conversations can be very complex. There are, however, four maxims that can be regarded as general principles in all conversations, those are:


(1) The Maxim of Quantity, try to make your contribution as informative as is required, in the other words, do not make your contribution more or less informative than is required;
Example of violation:
A: What time is it?
B: It's two a'clock, in fact it's four pass two, and now it's Sunday.


(2) The Maxim of Quality, try to make your contribution one that is true. At this point, to make your utterances understandable, you have to avoid saying something that you believe to be false or lack adequate evidence; 
Example of violation:
A: What is the Capital City of Indonesia?
B: I believe it's Bogor, or maybe Jakarta, Indonesia has wide territory. 


(3) The Maxim of Relevance, try to make your contributions relevant. It means you have to say some information which is related to the topic; 
Example of violation:
Mom: Have you done your homework?
Son: My bicycle is broken mom. 


(4)The Maxim of Manner, try to make your utterance as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and avoid obscurity and ambiguity. 
Example of violation:
"It’s the taste" (ads of Coca cola) 

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See also:
Grice's cooperative principle 
Cooperative Principle: Implicature
Cooperative Principle: Flouting Maxims
The Hedging of Maxims