A Critical Appraisal of Grice’s Cooperative Principle

Abstract

Grice's most influential contribution to linguistics is his theory of implicatures. He describes communica-tion as adhering to what he calls the Cooperative Principle (CP) and argues that a basic underlying as-sumption we make when we speak to one another is that we are trying to cooperate to construct meaning-ful conversations (1975). Grice's Cooperative Principle has been a central and controversial theme in pragmatics. A major source of controversy associated with the CP is that the term " cooperation " is open to different interpretations. In order to develop a thorough understanding of the concept, the CP and con-versational implicatures should be studied within the context of Grice's work. The present article is an at-tempt to critically examine various representations and interpretations of Grice's Cooperative Principle.