The Gricean Cooperative Principle at Work in Fictional Narratives : the Case of Reporting Clauses

Abstract

Reporting clauses (RCs) generally comply with the Gricean cooperative principle (1975) and its attendant conversational maxims within the framework of direct speech representation. RCs are commonly used in direct speech to provide additional or missing information, thus fulfilling the maxim of quantity and falling within the scope of “attributive discourse”. But many RCs appear to infringe upon the maxims. Grice argues that utterances which flout one or more of the four maxims do not truly imperil the above-mentioned principle ; on the contrary, they generate “implicatures”, or hidden meanings which can only be recovered through cooperation and interpretation. In this article, the focus is on the implicatures generated by the use of overtly transgressive RCs in literary texts, on the premise that cooperation is at work between the narrator and the reader in fiction.