3.6 Maxim of Manner • Avoid obscurity of expression • Avoid ambiguity • Be brief • Be orderly The maxim of manner is one of the ways people collaborate to build an intelligible conversation. Utterances must no be obscure, that is, as much as possible the meaning should not be hidden to the extent that the addressee would not be able to decode it. Likewise, ambiguous statements are always avoided. It could be frustrating listening to people whose utterances are full of ambiguous expressions. It is also important for our utterances to be brief and orderly. Brevity is one of the skills we try to acquire whenever we converse with others. We will not always have all the time to say all that we need to say. Since we know we have limited time to speak at anytime, we organize our speech in such an orderly manner that we are still able to capture everything we need to say within the limited period available to us. Self-assessed Exercises Discuss Grice’s Cooperative Principle. 4.0 Conclusion Whenever people are engaged in a conversation, they are engaged in a cooperative venture. They have a sense of how long they should talk and the kind of things they should say that will make their speech meaningful to their addressee. They also know what is meaningful to say in any context and how they should say it. These are the things HP. Grice summarized under his Cooperative Principle. Cooperating in conversation is done naturally as part of an average speaker’s competence. 9.0 Summary In this Unit we have examined the Grice’s Cooperative principle. The principle comprises of four maxims, which state how we cooperate whenever we are engaged in
100 a conversation. For instance, we do not say more than we ought to say We also ensure that we say is informative. We try to say only what is true and we ensure the relevance of our speech to the ongoing situation.
