Grice

Grice (1975) proposes that conversation is based on a shared principle of cooperation and his work on
the Cooperative Principle (CP) led to the development of pragmatics as a distinct discipline within
linguistics. It was argued that the major aim of communication in pragmatics is to give and receive
information; hence, people always try to adopt a cooperative behavior in conveying their concerns and
intentions and in transferring their utterances implicitly.Grice (1975) claimed that the process of
producing and perceiving of these implicatures is based on the following principle: “Make your
conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose
or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.” His theory rests on the assumption that
there is a distinction between saying and meaning. This means that speakers can produce implicit
meaning and their listeners are able to perceive intended meaning from their conversations. Moreover,
he argues that participants unconsciously follow certain rules and patterns in their conversations. Under
the general umbrella of the “cooperative principle,” Grice (1975) distinguishes more specific maxims:

1. Quantity. Speaker’s contribution is as informative as required.

2. Quality. Speaker tells the truth or provides adequate evidence for his/her statement.

3. Relation. Speaker’s response is relevant to the topic of conversation.

4. Manner. Speaker speaks straightforwardly and clearly and avoids ambiguity and obscurity.

These maxims identify a particular set of patterns in interaction and speakers are expected to make their
utterances informative, truthful, clear and relevant.

Grandy (1989) cited Grice’s argument that each step in a conversational exchange can be analyzed in
terms of whether it conforms to the maxims or not. There are four possibilities: in the most
straightforward case, all maxims are obeyed; in the most devious case, a maxim is disobeyed but
without the knowledge of the other participant. A different case is one where a participant overtly opts.
Another case is when a maxim is flouted, that is, it is disobeyed not secretly but by a clearly
nonconforming performance. At the heart of the classical Gricean notion of conversational implicature is
a certain assumption concerning the phenomenon that essentially, conversational implicatures are cases
of speaker-meaning. More specifically, according to the Gricean notion of implicature, a speaker
implicates p only if she means, or intend to communicate p by saying something else. This, according to
Buchanan (2013) is called meaning intention assumption. This means that if meaning-intention
assumption is correct, in order for a speaker to conversationally implicate p, she must mean, or intent to
communicate.

Grice defined conversational implicatures as a variety of implicatures, which is a concept that he

apparently expected could be grasped independently. Presumably, there is a connection between
Grice's general concept of implicature and his theory of speaker's meaning. In a broad sense, one might
be said to implicate that if and only if one means that q by doing something, where the pertinent kind of
meaning is that which Grice called utterer's occasion-meaning and defined in terms of the speaker's
intentions toward the hearer. Alte1rnatively, implicature might be defined more narrowly so that one
may be said to implicate that q only if one means that in this sense but the proposition that q is not
what is said (Grice 1989).
Michel Foucault

Today the theoretical work of Michel FOUCAULT is widely regarded as being part of the theoretical body
of social sciences like sociology, social history, political sciences and social psychology. But FOUCAULTian
notions are also fundamental in other dynamic fields such as cultural studies, gender studies and
postcolonial studies. Discourse theory concepts and arguments are no longer

restricted to linguistics or other sciences of language use. Today they are part of the social sciences.3
One of the reasons for this spread beyond the purely linguistic is that FOUCAULT conceived discourse as
social structure and discursive practice as social practice. “Discourse” is not simply dialogue or
philosophical monologue. The term “discourse” was first used to signify thegrammatical structure of
narratives (BARTHES, 1988). Here “discourse” was conceived as the order overarching the level of the
sentence. For a long time the various purely linguistic approaches to discourse were dominant (VANDIJK,
1985, 1997a, 1997b). In socio-linguistic approaches and conversation analysis (TEN HAVE, 1999)
“discourse” means an interactional order which emerges in social situations, so here “discourse” is an
interactionist concept (ANGERMÜLLER, 2001). In the different traditions of French structural is and (so
called) post structuralism the term discourse seems to be omnipresent.

In the structuralist era discourse was introduced as the underlying deep structure of the human mind
(LÉVI-STRAUSS) or the human psyche (LACAN). The FOUCAULTian use of this concept is the first that
combines a structuralist view with a praxeological interpretation of discourse into an (at least) dualistic
concept. FOUCAULTian discourse is conceived of as a super individual reality; as a kind of practice that
belongs to collectives rather than individuals; and as located in social areas or fields. However, as the
later work of FOUCAULT (1988, 1990, 2005) and the work of Judith BUTLER (1990, 1993) have shown,
discourses have an impact on individuals as they are discursively constructed and constituted. So some
researchers in the field (JÄGER, 2004; KELLER, 2007; DIAZ-BONE, 2007) consider the FOUCAULTian
concept of discourse to belong more to a meso- or macro-level than to a micro level (as in conversation
analysis or ethnomethodology) although it influences socialized individuals and interactions in social
situations. However, others in the field see, from a post-structuralist angle, the subject as constructed
and constituted on the basis of a discursive matrix: several articles in this special edition discuss the
relationship between a discursive matrix and subject ovation /subjectification (TATE, 2007, and, in the
context of dispositif, see alsoBÜHRMANN & SCHNEIDER, 2007). They focus on the subject and the
discursive constitution of the subject: in this way, FOUCAULTian discourse analysis enters the micro-
level.

John Langshaw

John Langshaw Austin, born on March 26th 1911 in Lancaster, England. He was trained as a classicist at
Balliol College Oxford. He fi rst came to philosophy by studying Aristotle, who deeply inf l uenced his
own philosophical method. He also worked on the philosophy of Leibniz and translated Frege’s
Grundlagen. Austin spent his whole academic life in Oxford, where he was White’s Professor of Moral
Philosophy from 1952 until his death in 1960. During the Second World War Austin was commissioned in
the Intelligence Corps, and played a leading role in the organization of D-Day, leaving the British Army in
1945 with the rank of Lt. Colonel. Austin published only seven articles.
According to Searle, Austin’s reluctance to publish was partly characteristic of his own attitude, but also
it was part of the culture of Oxford at the time: “Oxford had a long tradition of not publishing during
one’s lifetime, indeed it was regarded as slightly vulgar to publish” (Searle 2001, 227). Most of Austin’s
work was thus published posthumously, and includes a collection of papers (Austin 1961), and two
series of lectures reconstructed by the editors on the basis of Austin’s lecture notes: the lectures on
perception, edited by Geoffrey Warnock (Austin 1962a), and the William James Lectures held at Harvard
in 1955, devoted to speech acts, and edited by James O. Urmson (Austin 1962b) for the fi rst edition,
and by Urmson and Marina Sbisa for the second (Austin 1975). Austin’s most celebrated contribution to
contemporary philosophy is his theory of speech acts, presented in How to Do Things with Words
(Austin 1975). While for philosophers interested mainly in formal languages the main function of
language is describing reality, representing states of affairs and making assertions about the world, for
Austin our utterances have a variety of different uses. A similar point is made in Philosophical
Investigations by Wittgenstein, who underlines the “countless” uses we may put our sentences to
(Wittgenstein 1953: § 23). Austin contrasts the “desperate ” Wittgensteinian image of the countless uses
of language with his accurate catalogue of the various speech acts we may perform – a taxonomy similar
to the one employed by an entomologist trying to classify the many (but not countless) species of
beetles.

Zellig Harris

The term discourse analysis fi rst entered general use in a series of papers published by Zellig Harris
beginning in 1952 and reporting on work from which he developed transformational grammar in the late
1930s. Formal equivalence relations between sentences of a coherent discourse are made obvious and
explicit by using sentence transformations to regularize the text to a canonical form.

Words and sentences with equivalent information then appear in the same column of a binary array
(table). This work continued over the next four decades (see references) into a science of sublanguage
analysis (Kittredge & Lehrberger 1982), culminating in a demonstration of the information structures in
texts of an immunology sublanguage of science (Harris et al. 1989) and a fully articulated theory of
linguistic information content (Harris 1991). During this time, however, most linguists pursued a
succession of elaborate theories of sentence-level syntax and semantics. Though Harris had mentioned
the idea of analyzing whole discourses, he had not worked out a comprehensive model as of January
1952. A linguist working for the American Bible Society, James A. Loriot/Lauriault needed to fi nd
answers to some fundamental errors in translation of Quechua in the Cusco area of Peru. He took the
idea, recorded all of the legends and, after going over the meaning and placement of each word with a
national; he was able to form logical, mathematical rules that transcended the simple sentence
structure. He then applied the process to another dialect of Eastern Peru: Shipibo. He taught the theory
at Norman, Oklahoma in the summers of '56 and '57, and entered University of Pennsylvania in the
interim year. He tried to publish a paper Shipibo Paragraph Structure, but it was not published until
1970 (Loriot & Hollenbach 1970). In the meantime, Dr. Kenneth L. Pike, a professor at University of
Michigan Ann Arbor, taught the theory. and one of his students Robert E. Longacre was able to
disseminate it in a disertation. Harris's methodology was developed into a system for computer analysis
of natural language by a team led by Naomi Sager at NYU which has been applied to a number of
sublanguage domains, most notably to medical informatics. The software for the Medical Language
Processor has been made publicly available on SourceForge.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, and without reference to this prior work, a variety of other approaches to a
new cross-discipline of DA began to develop in most of the humanities and social sciences more or less
concurrently with, and in relation to, other new (inter- or sub-) disciplines, such as semiotics,
psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. Many of these approaches, especially those inf l
uenced by the social sciences, favor a linguist more dynamic study of (spoken, oral) talk-in interaction.