The Cooperative Principle

The misunderstandings illustrated in the last example can cause particular frustration because people make the general assumption that verbal exchanges will conform to what the philosopher Paul Grice has referred to as the cooperative principle. People can generally assume that in conversations in which, for example, the exchange of information is primary, speakers will not say more than is necessary for the purpose of the exchange and will say all that is necessary to convey the information required. They generally expect that what their interlocutor says is relevant to the topic at hand; that her message will be clear and understandable; and under normal circumstances she will not state something she doesn't believe to be true. The expectations of speakers and hearers in informational exchanges are in part shaped by these four maxims of the cooperative principle in conversation. If listeners are sometimes frustrated because they feel that their interlocutor is trying to give them unnecessary or irrelevant information, to avoid the topic, or worse, to deceive them, that is because they expect him/her to abide by the maxims for co-operative behavior.

Speakers from different cultural backgrounds may have different interpretations of what it means to be true, relevant, brief or clear with regard to conversations. They may have different definitions of the speech activity itself. A service encounter at the bank might have a different social value in India and in England, and the roles of cashier and customer might be differently defined. But they all enter a verbal exchange assuming that there will be some sort of cooperation between the parties involved.

Participants' Roles and the Co-construction of Culture

In addition to the institutional roles that speakers assume by virtue of their occupation or their status (for example, bank teller, customer, teacher, pupil), there are also local participant roles, or participation frameworks, according to the sociologist Erving Goffman, that all speakers and hearers must carve out for themselves through what they say and the way they say it. Through their register (informal, formal), their key or tone of voice (serious, jesting, sarcastic), the frequency of their interruptions, the way they take the floor, the feedback signals they give, their choice of lexical and grammatical structures, the distribution of their silences, participants in verbal exchanges play out various social roles that reveal a great deal about the social persona they wish to represent, and about the social personae they are thereby assigning to their interlocutors. For example, they may come across as confident or shy, interested or indifferent, close or distant, helpful or pushy; they may take on a friendly, competitive, bossy, motherly role.

They may take on various interactional roles as well. For example, consider the following interaction between A (male, husband), B (female, A's wife), and C (female, friend and neighbor);

A: Y'want a piece of candy?

B: No =

C: = She's on a diet

(Schiffrin, Deborah. Approaches to Discourse. London: Basil Blackwell 1994, page 107)

C is in a sense animating words that are not hers, but B's. By speaking for B, she might be perceived as either 'chipping in' in a helpful manner, or 'butting in' and not minding her own business. Her intervention at this point, latched on to B's rejection of A's offer, can be viewed as a cue to B and C's relationship and their relationship to A. C happens to be a long-time friend and neighbor of B; her utterance can therefore be understood as enacting B's role as helpful explainer of B's refusal, with the intention of minimizing the negative impact that B's rejection might have on A. In other contexts, speaking for another person might be viewed as signaling not solidarity, but, rather, an asymmetrical relationship of power and authority, such as when a mother speaks for her child, a husband for his wife, a teacher for a student.

Speaking for another or animating his/her words is one of the many roles participants can take vis-à-vis their words and those of others. Another role may be that of principal, i.e. talking by virtue of the institutional power granted the speaker by society. A third possible role is that of author, i.e. assuming responsibility for what one says. Speakers may often speak both as authors and as principals. In the example above, A offers B some candy both as a responsible user of the English language and as one who has the legitimate authority to offer candy to friends and family. Listeners in turn may be acknowledged or non-acknowledged participants playing a variety of roles: addressees, hearers, eavesdroppers, bystanders. Here B, A's wife, is the addressee; C, the visitor, is a ratified hearer.

It is through the enactment of these roles that culture is jointly constructed through language in action. For example, children are not only biological entities, but socially constituted roles, i.e. children are culturally constituted as children by parents who consistently 'speak for them', and by children who accept to be 'spoken for', as in the following well-known example:

Kathryn: Mommy sock. /de/ - dirty. Mother: Yes. They're all dirty. I know.

(Bloom, Lois M. One Word at a Time. The Hague: Mouton 1970, page 47).

The infant, who cannot speak properly yet (from the Latin in-fans: the one who does not speak), has to be spoken for by the mother, who speaks what she understands the child to mean. The same can be said of pupils whose words are animated and evaluated by teachers. Pupils' and teachers' membership in school culture is recognizable in part by the way teachers tend to animate pupils' utterances, as shown in the example below, where a teacher and her class are talking about apples:

Teacher: What color are the pips?

Child 1: Brown

Child 2: Black

Child 1: Brown

Child 2: Brown

Teacher: Yes they're dark brown that's right.

(Wells, Gordon Learning Through Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981, page 217)

Similarly, gender roles are not the natural result of biological makeup, but they, too, are socially constructed by males and females enacting different participant roles in conversation. These roles are achieved by a pattern of small cues that show either self-assertiveness or uncertainty, dominance or submissiveness, and that get attributed over time to one gender or another. Consider the following:

Husband: When will dinner be ready?

Wife: Oh ... around six o'clock ...?

(Lakoff, Robin. Language and Woman's Place. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1976, page 17)

The woman's rising intonation 'is often interpreted as signaling female uncertainty and lack of self-assertiveness (or, on the contrary, female considerateness). Compare the following:

Female: So uh you really can't bitch when you've got all those on the same day (4.2) but I uh asked my physics professor if l couldn't chan – ge that -

Male: - Don't - touch that

Female: What?

Male: I've got everything jus' how I want it in that notebook you'll screw it up leafin' through it like that

(West, Candace and Don H. Zimmerman. 'Small Insults: A study of interruptions in cross-sex conversations between unacquainted persons'. In B. Thorne, C. Kramarae, and N. Henley (Eds.) Language, Gender and Society. Newbury House 1983, page 105).

The male's interruption may be viewed as a sign of male dominance, his power to switch the topic to suit his own agenda. However, one may not automatically equate a participant's role with the gender of an individual before one has observed that individual behave in various contexts with various interlocutors of both similar and different gender.

Language use is a cultural act not only because it reflects the ways in which one individual acts on another individual through such speech acts as thanking, greeting, complimenting, that are variously accomplished in various cultures. Language use is a cultural act because its users co-construct the very social roles that define them as members of a discourse community.