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The fatal crash of a private plane led to a lawsuit brought by the insurer against the manufacturer of the aircraft's engine. Investigators found no evidence of engine malfunction, so the insurer tried to place blame for the crash on the theory that the pilot was overcome by trimethylol propane phosphate (TMPP) gases leaking into the cockpit, causing him to have cognitive impairment such as disorientation, and to crash the plane, killing all aboard. No research exists concerning the effects of TMPP on humans, but because it is a GABA inhibitor that affects speech severely in diseases like Huntington's Disease, it seemed logical for the defense to analyze the recording of the pilot's speech from the time he departed until the time he crashed. The pilot's speech then was analyzed for syntax, word frequency, speech acts, pauses and pause fillers, pronunciation, and his use of the cooperative principle. No linguistic evidence of any type of aberration in the pilot's speech could be found in the recorded air-to-ground communications from the start of the flight to its fatal conclusion.

The chapter introduces the linguistic tools that were used in the case examples of the following chapters: the speech event context, schema, agendas as revealed by the topics and responses to topics introduced by others, the cooperative principle, the speech acts used, their conversational strategies, the recency principle, and language ambiguity that results from grammatical and lexical features. Since deception and intention also play a role in perjury cases, these features are also discussed.

This chapter reviews Grice’s characterization of conversational implicature and introduces the thinking of later philosophers who have followed closely in his footsteps. They all explain conversational implicatures in terms of the norms of cooperative rationality. In particular, they posit that speakers often use utterances in ways that are compatible with these norms only under certain assumptions. These assumptions become conversational implicatures: they are content that the speaker contributes indirectly to a conversation by using an utterance. Grice develops this idea in terms of an overarching cooperative principle and attendant maxims of cooperative conversation. But, the chapter suggests, many accounts that appeal to different constructs, such as Stalnaker's account of pragmatic presuppositions and Thomason's account of presupposition accommodation, also rely on the rational organization of cooperative conversation to predict implicatures.

This chapter teases out some key theoretical issues relating to the scope, ethics, and situated analysis of insincerity, as one of the two faces of untruthfulness. It begins by grounding sincerity in an indispensable human need for trust and cooperation and notes how insincerity can breach trust. It then gives arguments for why the TRUST framework does not focus on deception. Grice’s implicature is considered fundamental to understanding insincerity within a framework of communicative cooperation, but his sincerity maxim unnecessarily narrows its scope. Instead, insincerity is viewed as the disruption of inquiry. By drawing on a psychological account of how untruthfulness works in situated discursive practice, the chapter argues that the concept of insincerity needs to be extended to cases of “editing out” where there is no textual clue to omission. This broadened conception of insincerity, which subsumes misleading and lying under withholding, is termed discursive insincerity.

In this chapter I describe a bankruptcy case in which a businessman was charged with perjury, based on both on his written statement of affairs submitted when he filed for bankruptcy and the hearing that followed. Linguistic analysis showed that his application form 6B was unclear and sometimes ambiguous in the information that it expected the defendant to supply, in violation of the cooperative principle. In the follow-up oral hearing, the defendant’s explanations about his entries on this form were considered deceptive evidence of his perjury. One of the businessman’s many difficulties was the lack of mutual understanding of references to “income,” “salary,” and “assets.” By examining the businessman’s use of these lexical items throughout the process, it is shown that this matter was one of misunderstanding rather than intentional deception.

This chapter describes the perjury charges of a shipping executive who was the shipping agent for the Khian Sea. After two years of sailing around the world trying to unload several tons of incinerator ash, the ship dumped most of it somewhere in the ocean. In his grand jury testimony, the shipping agent testified that he “had no idea” what happened to the ash, leading to his indictment for perjury. His trial included a linguistic analysis of the difference between literal truth and figurative language, reminiscent of the US Supreme Court ruling in Bronston v. United States. An important aspect of this case was the failure of the prosecution to recognize the speech event in which this testimony occurred. The shipping agent recognized and followed the requirements to satisfy the cooperative principle: to be as informative as required and to not say anything that was not relevant or anything for which he lacked verifiable evidence. Therefore, he refused to speculate. Interestingly, when the prosecutor asked him ambiguous questions, the shipping executive used the speech act of requesting clarification, but the prosecutor did not try to disambiguate any of the executive’s answers. The prosecution’s intelligence analysis in this case could be highly criticized.

On the basis of an electronic corpus, this chapter analyses elements such as Fr. assez ‘enough’, ça suffit ‘that’s enough’, tais-toi ‘be quiet’, arête tes bêtises ‘stop talking nonsense’, or Rom. destul/de ajuns ‘enough’, gata! ‘plenty’, lasă prostiile ‘stop talking nonsense’, taci din gură ‘shut up’, încetează ‘stop it’. These discourse markers, expressing disagreement or exasperation, seem to conflict with Grice’s conversational theory, which omits any confrontational and non-cooperative conversations such as police cross-examinations, political debates, trials, and lawsuits. Examples gathered represent the following situations: (a) the speaker protests against the purpose and the direction taken by the conversation or against the violation of conversational maxims; (b) the addressee rejects the conversational topic or refuses to respect the maxims; (c) disagreement markers express the speaker’s protest against the addressee’s non-verbal behaviour. This study concludes that the Cooperative Principle, as Grice stated it, is too strict.

This chapter sets out a framework for analyzing insincere discourse strategies. Though not equivalent, there is sufficient overlap between insincerity and deception to begin by considering typologies of deception based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle and the speaker’s communicative intentions and goals. However, the chapter argues for an approach to insincere discourse based on a number of communicative variables relating to pursuit of inquiry. Accordingly, the underlying insincere discourse strategy is considered to be withholding (failing to disclose what you believe you should disclose), while misleading involves linguistically leading the interlocutor astray with regard to that concealed knowledge either by suggestion (misleading without lying) or explicit assertion (lying). The insincere discourse strategies may be realized through sub-strategies (e.g., omitting, evading, and blocking) or more general pragmatic tactics (e.g., equivocating and falsely implicating). Insincere discourse becomes unethical or wrong when it is willful (i.e., it breaches trust and is not justifiably suspended).

This essay argues that the specificity Lepore & Stone demand of accounts of metaphors and other cases can be made compatible with the Gricean framework. It is argued that the Cooperative Principle and principles of rationality must be presupposed in order to embark on the coordinated activities of language use described by Lepore & Stone and that specific interpretive strategies enter into the picture when the hearer is trying to reconstruct the point of the speaker’s saying what she did. Lepore & Stone are correct that there need not be a proposition meant by a metaphor. Instead, the point of uttering a metaphor of the form x is y is to implicate a perspective of x as y. Many of Lepore & Stone’s objections can be handled by this revised proposal. This essay also explores how Lepore & Stone’s framework might illuminate the case of idiomatic phrases.

Speech practices and tacit assumptions associated with them vary a great deal across languages and cultures. Yet in Anglophone social science such diversity is often ignored and Anglo/English ways of speaking are mistaken for the human norm. A particularly striking example of such absolutization of Anglo norms is presented by an influential article by the American philosopher H. P. Grice (1975). Grice’s basic ideas were transplanted onto the ground of linguistics by linguists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson and continue to exercise considerable influence in language studies. This chapter discusses in detail the Anglocentrism of Grice’s “Cooperative Principle” and of the linguistic theories based on it, and offers an alternative: the theory of “cultural scripts.” The explanatory power of this theory and its language-independent character are illustrated with many cultural scripts, some of which are formulated not only in English but also in Chinese.

Chapter 4 reviews Grice’s “Cooperative Principle” and Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory, demonstrating how the latter complements Construction Grammar and fits into a Cognitive theory of writing. The concept of linguistic accommodation is introduced along with the results of experimental pragmatics. A different approach to audience from those usually considered in compositionist treatments is argued for. Finally, the chapter considers the significance of studies of aphasia for theories of writing.

This chapter addresses the problem of the persistence of assertion in the face of systematic peer disagreement. This problem can be resolved by appeal to the hypothesis that the standard set by assertion’s norm is fixed in part in terms of what is mutually believed by the speaker and her audience in the context in which the assertion is made. What is more, such a “context-sensitive” account of the norm of assertion enjoys strong independent support: it can be motivated by appeal to Grice’s guiding idea that conversation is a cooperative and rational activity between agents, where the rationality of speech contributions is to be understood by reference to how they contribute to the mutually acknowledged aims.

This chapter explores a number of pragmatic aspects of the evidentiary discourse. By calling them “pragmatic” the author refers to the aspects that are typically the province of “pragmatics” and can be generically defined as the study of the use of language in context; and by “evidence discourse” he refers to the discourse that is carried out about juridical evidence. This discussion restates the basic distinction between semantics and pragmatics and then addresses the nature of the speech acts in evidence discourse, the role of implicatures and presuppositions, and the place of deixis, i.e., the use of indexicals and demonstratives. The author claims that evidence discourse is predominantly assertive; that problems associated with implicatures are abated as questioners are skilled and questions are specific; that exploitation of presuppositions is avoided by attorneys’ vigilance and judicial control; and, finally, that deixis reveals the discourse’s ostensive dimension.