more info about maxims

The cooperative principle:
This principle includes four maxims that govern tacitly human communication. They are not to be taken as rules but as suggestions that implicitly guide our interactions and helps us in understanding each other’s. These maxims are: the quality maxim, the quantity maxim, the manner maxim and the relevance maxim.

The quality maxim:
It states that we should try to make our contributions in any oral or written language interaction as sincere as possible. Otherwise, we can lose our listener/ reader attention or be taken as a fool.
The quantity maxim:
It recommends not to include in our interactions more information than necessary; that is it suggests us to be brief. This is because if we are not brief enough we can also lose our listener’s attention because s/he can get impatient or bored.
The manner maxim: it says that our messages should be as clear as possible in order to be understood more easily.
The relevance maxim: it states that we should try to make our messages as relevant as possible according to the contextual situation; this means saying what is appropriate according to the situation, the topic of conversation, the relation we have with the person we are speaking to.
As everything we have studied so far, the respect for these maxims depends on contextual factors such as the type of relation between the speakers, the formality of the situation, the place where they are interacting, etc. for instance,
 Two close friends at the movie might violate the quality and the manner maxims when speaking to each other during the film in order to avoid perturbing the rest of the public.
 Teachers tend to violate the quantity maxim to reinforce their explanations and to increase their students’ understanding.
 Two doctors speaking in front of their patient about his/her terminal health condition will violate the manner maxim by filling their discourse with technical vocabulary in order to avoid their patient’s concern.


The frequent violation of the cooperative maxims implies that when we acquire a language we also acquire the knowledge about when the cooperative maxims can be violated; that is; we know when we are socially allowed to do so. Some of the language resources, most frequently used for doing so, are what we call the figures of speech. In any language, we can find a multiple variety of figures of speech; some of them are explained and illustrated below.