Using Language

In my previous post, I’m a little bit talking about language. The main function of language is to communicate. In communicating with others, we make a conversation which has some principles on it. Paul Grice, an American philosopher who is regarded as ‘father of pragmatics’ emphasized that human beings communicate efficiently because they are by nature helpful to one another. He attempted to specify the principles which underlie this cooperative behaviour, and proposed four maxims or rules of conversation which can jointly be summarized as a general principle: “Be Cooperative”. These are the four maxims below.

Conversation

Maxim of Quantity

Give the right amount of information when you talk. If someone at a party asked, “Who’s that person with Edward?”, a cooperative answer would be, “That’s his new girlfriend, Isabella”. An uncooperative reply would be an over brief one, such as, “A girl”, or an over long one, such as, “That’s Isabella Marie Swan, born in Forks, USA on 13^th September 1987, daughter of Charlie and Ranee Swan….. etc”.

Maxim of Quality

Be truthful. For example, if someone asked you the name of an unfamiliar animal, such as platypus, you should reply truthfully, and don’t say, “It’s a kookaburra”, or “It’s a duck”, if you know it’s platypus.

Maxim of Relevance

Be relevant. If someone says, “What’s for supper?” , give a reply which fits the question, such as, “Fish and chips”, and not “Tables and chairs”, or “Buttercups are yellow”.

Maxim of Manner

Be clear and orderly. For example, describes things in the order in which they occurred: “The plane taxied down the runway, and took off to the rest” rather than “The plane took off to the west and taxied down the runway”, which might confuse people as to what actually happened.

Here’s a video from youtube which tells about how to use language effectively.

The effective way to communicate is make us easy to deliver our message to the receivers. I hope that my explanation above is quite clear, if isn't, you can try to find another source that can give more understanding to you. Thank you for reading :)

Source:

• Linguistics by Jean Aithcison
• Image from Google
• Video from YouTube