Conversational Maxims and Conversational Implicature

Grice's theory of the “cooperative principle” (CP) includes the two key concepts of conversational implicature and conversational maxims. Implicature can simply be understood as what is unsaid but still meant in a given utterance. The four maxims that Grice delineates are the rules that must be obeyed in a conversation in order for communication to succeed. When speakers obey the CP in an interaction, they cannot feasibly state everything that they intend to say, and thus, Grice claims, they flout, or disobey, various maxims in order to implicate to their interlocutors the full extent of what they really mean. In linguistic anthropology, these ideas have generally been taken up as a statement of a culture‐specific ideology of how language works in interaction. Many have therefore taken it upon themselves to explore, in interaction, how conversational rules and “understoods” happen in specific conversational moments using real conversational data.