INTRODUCTION:

The paper is divided into two parts. The first part illustrates some of the key assumptions of the Gricean theory of conversation. The objectives of part two examines the cases of the study to identify the implications and to ensure effective communication adherence and non-adherence to the stated principles as briefly mentioned below and illustrated in Manoj Das’s “The Escapist” and Oscar Wilde’s “Happy Prince”. The resulting violation of maxims leads to miscommunication though attempt is made to study implications in the proposed texts. Certain theoretical postulates need elaboration.

Speaker and listener want to behave cooperatively. This means that people want to be understood. Grice proposed four conversational Maxims.

Maxim of Quantity:

Say enough for your counterpart to understand but say too much or you will cause confusion.

Maxim of Quality:

Tell the truth, don’t speculate. Provide evidence of your claim.

Maxim of Relevance:

Don’t say anything irrelevant.

Maxim of Manner:

Avoid ambiguity, vagueness, verbosity, stick to logical argument.

Geoffrey Leach adds the Maxim of Politeness. Avoid Irony, i.e., saying one thing when you really mean the opposite. Do not use antithetical statements that produce tension. Sometimes we violate the maxims without being noticed, i.e., lying. We find that maxim of quantity has priority over other maxims because other maxims come into operation only under the assumption that other maxims are being observed.

Our talk exchanges are not always direct. Sometimes they happen without conforming to the maxim. In that situation; the utterance cannot be dismissed as nonsense. Rather a right meaning can be inferred from that indirect speech. Grice says that non fulfilment of a maxim generates implicature which helps the hearer to interpret an indirect expression.

We present an opposite picture here. Some prominent writers like Samuel Beckett presents that in literary genre, “a language is most effectively used when it is being effectively misused. This inputs to, subversive agenda of words and with a rare candour, he states that a good piece of writing is basically an act of miscommunication. Grice stands a polar opposite to this counter perspective and pleads for resolving ambiguity in the framework in his famous cooperative principles of communication.

The first text discusses the flouting of Gricean Maxims in Manoj Das’s story. The objectives are to identify the flouting of maxims and to suggest how it leads to miscommunication, misunderstanding and put in jeopardy the cooperative principles (CP) in the act of communication.

About Manoj Das

Manoj Das’s stories are internationally acclaimed. Dr K S Srinibas Iyengar in his Indian writing in English described him as the first writer from Odisha to publish a collection of short stories in English. As a social critic he uses his writings to depict the passion and foibles of man as they surface in different circumstances. His world glitters with satire which is not plain anger but a generous irony. He takes up ordinary situation and lends a profound grandeur with subtle understanding of nature. Most of his stories have been analysed from various literary perspectives (theme and style). However, this paper is an interdisciplinary attempt to study how information is processed through application of Gricean Maxims.

Extracts from Manoj Das: “The Escapist”

The narrator has lost his purse in a tea shop. He is disappointed in his effort to recover it. While coming back from the tea shop, he remembers that he has kept his bicycle unlocked on the roadside. He apprehends that the bicycle will go in the way of the purse. He starts running to the bicycle spot. On the way, he unfortunately bumps against a lady. She gets furious. The conversation between the narrator and the lady begins. The Small Talk as borrowed from the text.

Narrator…sorry, ma….

Lady….Bastard!

(Crest fallen the narrator slows down)

The First Turn:

In the present piece of conversation among the three participants, the first contribution is,

‘Sorry Ma….’. This message of two words is an apology advanced by the narrator. The first word ‘sorry’ does not state the reason of his apology. Sorry, a single word is devoid of any earnestness due to absence of a complete sentence structure like “I am very sorry for my unintentional bumping against you”. The word ‘sorry’ is also reduced to a mere utterance only not conveying genuine intent. Sometimes different interactants in a polite conversation use it as a ritual of courtesy, without having any communication value. The most deplorable is one where the real intention is hidden. A habitual mischief monger can cunningly escape through a ‘sorry’ utterance without being ashamed of the misconduct and being unconcerned about the victim’s feeling of pangs and anguish.

The narrator utters the word “Ma” (means mother). In Gricean perspective, it is untrue. He also flouts the Maxim of Quality because he is so brief that it is difficult to decipher the exact meaning. He should have uttered, ‘you are like my mother’.

The Second Turn.

The lady’s utterance of ‘bastard’ violates four maxims: Maxim of Quality, Maxim of Quantity, Maxim of Manner and Maxim of Relation. The single word having no subject predicate support stands in isolation unlike imperative verbs or yes/no answer. This word is unable to give complete meaning of the speaker’s message. Several sentences can emerge:

(i)Don’t call ma ‘Ma’. You are a bastard.

(ii)A bastard like you can do any moral offence with his mother.

(iii)I am not your mother. You behave like a bastard.

(iv)Only bastard like you can misbehave with his mother.

(v)Are you a bastard?

(vi)You are a bastard.

The lady does not speak a complete sentence like the above. It causes the violation of Quantity Maxim. Here it is observed that violation of one maxim leads to violation of other maxims. Non compliance of Quantity Maxim causes the violation of Manner Maxim. In the absence of a structurally complete sentence, the lady’s conversational contribution appears ambiguous. The meaning of her expression is left to the interactant’s guess. Even by the context also, the isolated utterance ‘bastard’ does not render a clear meaning. The reader is confused whether the lady’s anger is triggered by the narrator calling her ‘Ma’ or ‘sorry’ which she perceives to be mechanically driven.

The quality maxim is flouted in the lady’s expression. The lady speaks the untruth. The narrator is an orphan but not a bastard. The lady and the narrator are known to each other as two civilians who happen to meet and interact as per chance. They have no knowledge about one’s birth –parentage or about who is a bastard and who is not. The confrontation between the narrator and the lady is merely coincidental without any concretely visible precedence.

The lady’s utterance is a provocative outburst. The lady does not accept apology. She probably doubts that the narrator is a street ruffian who behaves immodestly with women. She also has an impression that bastards because of the very illegitimacy of their birth have neither social responsibility nor obligation to social norms and ethics.

The lone expression ‘bastards’also breaks the maxim of relation. In the turn taking process the narrator’s turn opens up the topic honest and humble apology for an inadvertent civic offence. The speaker offers his apology to the hearer and the hearer has to exercise his discretion, either to accept or to reject the apology offer. The lady is prejudiced in touching the sensitive buttock of the interlocutor’s suspected illegitimacy with which the apology topic has no relation. Thus the lady flouts the Maxim of Relation and the implicature is that she dislikes the uncivil approach of the narrator.

The Third Turn

Now come to the conversational contribution of the third interactant: the groundnut vendor in the turn taking process. He has absolutely no role in the apology –part of the conversation; he his ordinarily a mute onlooker. However, he not only overhears the conversational contributions of the narrator and the lady but also makes a neutral assessment of them. In the long run he chooses to participate in the conversation by questioning the utterance of the word ‘bastard’ by the narrator. He asks the narrator to wait for a minute. This is an attempt to enliven the conversation by dragging it to the point of termination. The vendor dare not ask anything directly to the lady probably because he knows that by doing so he will invite himself the danger of the gender –conflict. There is sense in avoiding such risk. He has already witnessed the lady’s irritable temper and his uncharitable rebuff to the narrator’s apology offer.

The groundnut vendor takes for granted the prima facie contributions (Ma and bastard) of the two earlier interactants (the narrator and the lady). The narrator calls the lady ‘Ma’but she calls him a ‘bastard’. The vendor takes these two expressions together and constructs his own part on them. He says, ‘if she is your Ma and you are a bastard she ought to know the devil who fathered you’. His is a simple logic. The vendor persuades the narrator to demand the name of the arrogant lady. Thus the dying conversation gets a regenerating dose. The vendor being a third party to the conversation joins the conversation on his own accord and interferes in the process. Neither the narrator nor the lady expects him. It is not clears to whom the vendor actually supports, whether the narrator or the abusing lady. It is also not clear whether the vendor wants to appease and entertain his own curiosity and showmanship at the narrator’s illegitimacy or proactively proceeds with his campaign for emotional support to the bastards in the society by protesting the vainglory and ruthlessness of the megalomaniac lady. Hence the readers are inclined to doubt the over-enthusiastic quality of the vendor. Pragmatically seen, the vendor gins nothing from the provocation between the narrator and the lady. He merely wants to run the show, seldom cares about whoever wins it. The vendor has a business motif too. He can sell his groundnuts when passers-by gather to witness the quarrel.

In the process of conversation, the vendor’s contribution abides by the Gricean Maxim of Quantity, but flouts the Maxim if Quality and manner. He says, “If she is your Ma and you are a bastard….” That the lady is the narrator’s mother is false .It is also not true that narrator is a bastard .Both the statements of the vendor are false at the author-reader interpretation level. Thus the Quality Maxim is flouted.

The vendor is not actually interested in the reason why the narrator is not demanding an answer from the lady. He has a different intention which he does not open declare. His words, by flouting the Maxim of Manner, generate the implicature. One should be broad-hearted to accept the apology of the penitent. Additionally there is no goodness in insulting other without any rhyme or reason. The whole thing is summarised below in a tabular form. Grundy (2000) states that whenever a maxim is violated, there must be an implicature to save the utterance from being misunderstood.

Table of Turn taking during Conversation:

TaleI Number of turns	Small Talks	Nature of Flouts	Maxim Flouted	Implicature	Social Function Defeated
First turn	Sorry	Inadequate information, untrue	Maxim Of Quantity	Narrator hints at apology
	Ma	Inadequate information	Maxim of Quantity	Narrator hints at compromise
Second Turn	Bastard: purpose is to achieve social cohesiveness. Reduction of threat. Values of social contact	Untrue Ambiguity Prejudice Irrelevance	Maxim of Quality Violated Maxim of Matter Violated	Lady knows nothing about the narrator. Lady hides her communicative intention. Lady tries to direct her concern away from apology.
Third Turn	Wait a minute, if she your ‘Ma’ and you are a bastard	Untrue	Maxim of Quality flouted	Intention to convey the lady that she did a wrong thing by calling the narrator bastard.	Social interaction obstructed
	Why don’t you demand of her to reveal it	prolixity	Manner Maxim violated	Intention to spare the lady of the blushes by not addressing her directly

The word ‘sorry’ flouts the

(i)Gricean Maxim of Quantity.

(ii)The narrator gives less information than required.

(iii)It is also a conscious remark.

The word ‘Ma’ flouts the Gricean Maxim of Quantity and Quality.

(a)The narrator gives less information than required.

(b)He fails to explain either the reason or the background behind him bumping into the lady.

(c)He tries to escape from this accidental situation as quickly as possible.

(d) He was completely preoccupied with his lost purse in the tea shop

(e) His utterance of ‘Ma’ was untrue and lacks the genuine intent.

How the word ‘bastard’ flouts all the Gricean Maxim;

(i)The lady gives less information than required.

(ii)She calls the narrator ‘bastard’ not in commensurate with hi misdeed of accidental bumping.

(iii)She did not know the narrator beforehand. So her calling him bastard tantamount to blatant lies.

(iv)Her utterance ‘bastard’ rests on untruth and inadequate evidences. Thus she flouts the Maxim if Quality.

(v) ‘Bastard’ was never a relevant response to ‘sorry Ma’. Thus she flouts the Maxim of Relation.

(vi)She was not clear as to the consequences of her utterances.

(vii) One word ‘Bastard’ involves absence of brevity.

(viii)The word ‘bastard’ hides her communicative intention. Thus she flouts the Maxim of Manner.

‘Ma’ and ‘Bastard’ words are disruptive enough in singlehandedly defeating the purpose of social functions of small talks in these particular contexts.

The vendor took the narrator’s utterance of ‘Ma’ as a statement of fact. The vendor equally took the lady’s utterance of ‘bastard’ as another statement of fact. There is no reason to believe that the vendor is trying to deceive us unless the vendor’s utterance is entirely pointless, he must be trying to convey some other proposition. The most obviously related proposition is the exact opposite of one he has expressed. The vendor persisted in saying that why that lady did not demand a curt explanation but concludes about her perceived ill-manners.

The Maxim of Relation is related to the minimum flouting. This shows that ‘insufficiency ‘in use of words and ‘untrue’ messages is deadly combination of flouts in disrupting the well-intentioned. Small talks Small texts are least sensitive to the flouting of Maxim of Relation and most sensitive to the Maxims of Quality and Quantity. So, a speaker can ill-afford the flouting of the Maxims of Quality and Quantity during the Small Talks.

Finally a correlation is established between the word used in this context of small talks and the maxim it flouts. Thus, a single word ‘bastard’ defeats all the good intentions of small talks like achieving social cohesiveness, reducing inherent threat values of social contact and forging a structure of social interaction.

Let us analyse the third turn of the Small Talk. The vendor’s involvement in the conversation seems to be abrupt and unexpected. He appears as a situational interceptor rather than a naturally assumed interlocutor. His abruptness is clearly promoted by the lady’s implied indifference to the narrator’s earnest apology. A child is a bastard as the identity of its father and mother is not publicly known. The vendor knows that the mother in a stigmatized society cannot reveal the devil’s identity even though she knows it. The vendor notices two things:

Firstly, the lady disclaims the mother-son relationship with the narrator and secondly she gives no evidence to her own assertion about narrator’s bastardy. From these two things the vendor finds it easy to prove that the narrator is not a bastard. The vendor’s interactional significance lies in his indirect insistence on apology from the lady for deliberately damaging the narrator’s social prestige.

We can conclude that in this specific case of small talks from Manoj Das’s story, the intensity and frequency with which the GRICEAN maxims are flouted, these thereby defeat the very purpose of social harmony and result in miscomprehension.

The Second Text discusses the Conversational Implicature in of Oscar Wilde’s short story entitled ‘Happy Prince’. Here the objective of the study is to identify the implicatures in the utterances of the characters and to describe about a Prince who was leading a life of luxury and did not know anything beyond the walls of his castle. After his death, his statue adorned with gold and precious stones was placed on a high pedestal, surveying the entire city. He could observe the miseries of most of the inhabitants of the city. Once a swallow took refuge at the feet of the statue and saw the sadness of the Prince. The swallow took out all the precious metals of the statue to give them to the people who needed them as per the advice of the statue.

The prince had given away the two sapphires of his eyes to the people in need by the help of the swallow and become blind. The writer discusses the power of philanthropy. The comforts and riches get meaning when you give it to the people who are hungry and disadvantaged. God bless those who serve humanity. One should be kind and generous and remember those who are less fortunate.

We have selected few extracts from the strong using the familiar method of pragmatics, we prefer to use the speaker-hearer terms for interpreting the meaning of small talks. Grice says that conversational implicature can be defined as “A Different (Opposite additional, etc) Pragmatic meaning of an utterances with respect to literal meaning expressed (Jacob L.Mey,1998.371).When Gricean maxims, (Quantity, Quality etc) are violated ,there emerge implicatures, to give more elaboration of the language used in the extracts. Thus the concept of implicature is utterance meaning as opposed to sentence meaning. Our present study of Oscar Wilde is an attempt to locate implicatures in the dialogues of characters and explain the element of missing links.

The extracts are small talks are as follows: (Extracts from Oscar Wilde’s story Happy Prince)

(i) “Who are you ?” he said

I am the Happy Prince.

“Why are you weeping then?”Asked the swallow;

“You have quite drenched me”

The swallow gave the correct answer to the statue and conforms to the Quantity maxim.

(ii) “I am glad that you are going to Egypt at last little swallow”, said the prince.

“You have stayed too long here, but kiss me on my lips for I Love you”

“It is not Egypt that I am going”, said the swallow. “I am going to the house of death. Death is the brother of sleep, is he not?” and kissed the Happy Prince on the lips, and fell down dead at his feet”.

The swallow gave an answer which exactly provided the quantity of information need.

Quantity maxim is adhered to.

(iii) Interestingly Oscar Wilde devised plots of helping the playwright, showing sympathy to the hungry man and saving the little match girl from being beaten by the father. These three separate small conversations are in accordance with GRICEAN maxim of sympathy. The climax of the story reached when the Happy Prince asked the swallow to pluck his eye and give the rare Indian Sapphire to her.

(iv)“I will stay with you one night longer” said the swallow. “But I cannot pluck out your eye. You would be quite blind then”. The conversation is in line of the Grecian sub maxims of politeness principle.

(v) “It is a ridiculous attachment twittered the older swallows; “she has no money, and far too many relations and indeed the river was quite full of reeds. Then, when the autumn came they all flew away”. This is an instance of flouting the maxim of approbation.

(vi) “He was very much admired indeed”. He is as beautiful as a weathercock, “remarked one of the town councillors who wished to gain a reputation for having artistic tastes”. This is an instance of ironical expression.

The words of the town councillors that the statue of Happy Prince is as beautiful as weathercock are in contradiction with the character. The writer’s remark is indirect one, tracing the implicature from the understatement. Thus many of the episodes in the story contain ironical statement. There is an attack on the style of functioning of the public officials.

In the short story, ‘Happy Prince’. Oscar Wilde represents implicatures, implied meaning by connecting it with Cooperative Principles, Politeness Principle and Ironical Principles. Once the implicatures in the story are traced and analysed, lots of misunderstanding among the readers will be minimized.

CONCLUSION:

To conclude, this paper has examined conversation from the celebrated bilingual writer, Manoj Das’s The Escapist and Oscar Wilde’s Story, Happy Prince within the framework of Gricean Maxims. It appears that more data covering a wide variety of such interactions must be studied so that the interpretations of conversation in literary texts can be made with clear theoretical significance. It is an interdisciplinary study comprising language, culture, society and communication.

REFERENCES:

1. Coupland, Justine 2003.Small Talk. Social Functions. Harlow Longman

2. Grice, Paul.1974. Logic and Conversation. P 1-25. London Oxford University Press

3. Hurford, James R .1983. Semantics: A Course book, New York, Cambridge University Press.

4. Leech, Geffrey.1983. Principles of Pragmatics. United States of America. Longman Group.

5. Levinson, Stephen C.1983.Pragmatics. Blackwell. United States of America.

6. Palmer, F.R.1981. Semantics. New York. Cambridge University Press.

7. Yule, George.1996. Pragmatics. New York. Oxford University Press.

Received on 15.03.2022 Modified on 14.04.2022

Int. J. Ad. Social Sciences. 2022; 10(2):59-64.