H. P. Grice's Utterance Theory

There is a gap between the literal meaning of a sentence and the speaker’s meaning or intervention in an utterance. When studying conversation, other factors other than the literal meaning of the words and the meanings that come up from their combinations also determine meaning. These other factors are what is called context.

Communication involves a sender and receiver and the sender usually has an intention to cause the hearer to do something or understand something by getting him/her understood that the sender is trying to cause that thought or action.

Therefore, communicative intention and the interpretation of utterance include all aspects of inferences and implicatures. This paper H.P Grice’s theory on communication and its development to the relevance

Therefore, Grice’s account of theory of meaning was interpreted as a theory of communication for which he proposed the cooperative principle, guiding as on how communication can be achieved and how meaning can be communicated non-naturally than what is actually said. According to Grice, this can be used to explain implicature, a type of inference that is based on the speaker’s intended meaning.

The CP is supported by 4 over-arching principles/guidelines that guide the conduct of conversation that he calls maxims. Therefore, the hearer manages to make the best guess about the meaning of the speaker from a set of logical and possible explanations.

Therefore the CP and the maxims attempt to explain how one is able to decipher the speaker’s meaning or intention (i.e. implicatures).

Grice also further claims that interlocutor’s can violate the C.P and the maxims either correctly or overtly and for each violation there is an intended purpose and consequence, for example to lie in order to misguide, to use a metaphor, in order to overtly imply a figurative