A lot of meaning is indirect. It comes about via **implicature** and **inferencing**. ### H. P. Grice and the Cooperative Principle In [[Grice 1975 - Logic and Conversation]], H. P. Grice elucidates the Cooperative Principle, which has four key maxims: > 1. **Quantity.** If you are assisting me to mend a car, I expect your contribution to be neither more nor less than is required; if, for example, at a particular stage I need four screws, I expect you to hand me four, rather than two or six. > 2. **Quality.** I expect your contribution to be genuine and not spurious. If I need sugar as an ingredient in the cake you are assisting me to make, I do not expect you to hand me salt; if I need a spoon, I do not expect a trick spoon made of rubber. > 3. **Relation.** I expect a partner's contribution to be appropriate to immediate needs at each stage of the transaction; if I am mixing ingredients for a cake, I do not expect to be handed a good book, or even an oven cloth (though this might be an appropriate contribution at a later stage). > 4. **Manner.** I expect a partner to make it clear what contribution he is making, and to execute his performance with reasonable dispatch. > > \- Grice, p. 47 These maxims allow us to make sense of conversations like this: > (1) A: I am out of petrol. B: There is a garage around the corner. It's pretty obvious what the salient relationship of the "garage around the corner" is to A's problem, so the maxims are being followed. *Flouting* the maxims allows you to produce irony, metaphor, understatement. Here's an example Grice gives: > _3. Failure to be brief or succinct._ Compare the remarks: > > (a) _Miss X sang 'Home sweet home.'_ > (b) _Miss X produced a series of sounds that corresponded closely with the score of 'Home sweet home'._ ### #teaching Implicature is very important for teaching [[writing]]. Students (and many people who don't specialize in writing but who want students to "write better") often think that writing better is all about being "more accurate" or something like that. Implicature shows that there is way, way more to communication than being "accurate" or being "precise." Readers pick up on contextual and [[genre|generic]] cues and conventions when interpretating what they read. Those cues determine the implicature. A lot of [[subtle signals and metalanguage]] are about "exploiting" these norms. Teaching a student to write, therefore, is less about teaching them to be "precise" (or whatever), and more about teaching them to navigate or exploit generic norms and conventions so as to have better control over their meaning. Students already "do" implicature—every single day. They just don't have full control over it when they're writing in unfamiliar genres, with norms and conventions (unwritten rules, as it were) that still seem, to the student, a bit ambiguous. Consider the placement of a parenthetical citation after a paraphrased summary of this or that research finding (usually appearing in a longer lit review), like this: > Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. **(Grice 1977)** If there are no quotation marks, it's purely genre-based, inferential norms and convention (the construction of the sentence, its tempo and rhythm) that allow a reader decode which part of the preceding sentence is actually being attributed to Grice 1977.