Cooperative Principles: The Hedging of Maxims

Hedging is any deliberately ambiguous statement or any equivocal statement. Grundy (2000) includes hedging among other mitigating devices in his politeness marker category ‘downgraders’. He calls there devices, hedges, play-downs, understaters, downtoner, or ‘minus’ comminters.

The hedges and intensifiers are more comment on the extent to which the speakers abiding by the maxims which guide our conversational contributions than a part of what is said or conveyed. It seems that when we talk, we not only convey messages, but also frequently like to tell each other how informative, well founded, relevant, and perspicuous these messages are. Speakers frequently use highly grammaticalized hedges and intensifiers to inform their addressees of the extent to which they are abiding by the maxims. These hedges and intensifiers show that the guiding principles for talk suggested by Grice really do exist and that speakers orient reflexively to these principles as they communicate.

Levinson (1985) states that the theory of conversational implicature is a theory of language in which language is viewed as a self-contained system of rules. He further argues that there are interesting relations between structure and function of the language. Thus, the English particles such as ‘well’, ‘oh’, ‘ah’ ‘so’, ‘anyway’, ‘actually’, ‘still’, ‘after all’, are the lexical items which at time refer to the notion of conversational implicature and are being described as “maxim hedges” indication how an utterance is preface in order o make up to cooperative expectation.

Moreover, in academic speech, hedging is most appropriately described as either (a) a lack of competence commitment to the truth value of an accompanying proposition, or (b) a desire not to express that commitment categorically.

Myers (1989) groups all linguistic devices under his categories of "negative politeness and hedging, focusing less on the description of the linguistic devices themselves than on their purpose or motivation. Further, hedging is a politeness strategy when it marks a claim or any other statement as being provisional, pending acceptance in the literature, acceptance by the community-in other words, acceptance by the listeners.  He goes to point out that hedging can be realized in any different linguistics forms, and gives examples of the use of condition statements, modifiers, verb choice, framing statement that indicates the weight a statement should have or the degree of doubt involved, and even statements of personal opinion.

Quality Hedges
Brown and Levinson (1990) state that quality hedges may suggest that the speaker is not taking full responsibilities for the truth of his utterances. For instance:
          think…
I         believe…
          assume…

Or alternatively they may stress S’s commitment to the truth of his utterances; in other words, they reflect the commitment of the writer to the quality of the proposition contained in the subsequent part of the statements and do not contribute truth value to the statements as a whole. Such as, I absolutely (deny/ promise/believe) that…, others take the opposite view and say…, The issue says…, It is quite right what people say…, Some people believe that…, So you can imagine even…, In this case..., etc. Or they may disclaim the assumption that the point of S’s assertion is to inform H, such as, As you know…, As it well known…, As you and I both know…, etc.

Quantity Hedges
Quantity hedges, we find archetypal examples in these English expressions, which give notice that not as much or not as precise information is provided as might be expected, such as: roughly, more or less, approximately, give or take a few, or so, I should think, I can’t tell you more than that it’s…, to some extent, all in all, in short, basically, so to speak, etc. the assertion of personal opinion show that the information tried to be conveyed is limited.

Relevance Hedges
In Relevance hedges, we note that because of sensitivity of topic changes as impositions on H’s face, such changes are often done off record. Hedges that mark the change, and perhaps partially apologize for it, include, by the way…, oh I know…, anyway…, this may not be relevant/ appropriate/ timely but…, I might mention at this point…, while I remember…, etc.

Manner Hedges
Finally, some common Manner hedges includes, what I meant was…, more clearly…, to put it more simply…, you see, yeah?, got it?, OK?, is that clear?, see?, etc.

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See also:
Grice's cooperative principle 
Cooperative Principle: Implicature
Cooperative Principle: Flouting Maxims
The Hedging of Maxims 

Cooperative Principle: The Flouting of Maxims

The infringement of maxims which involves exploitation, that is, a procedure by which a maxim is flouted for the purpose of getting a conversational implicature, is usually carried out by means of indirect, contradictory utterances, or figure of speech such as irony, metaphor, overstatement, understatement, tautology, and hyperbole. Grundy (2000) states that whenever a maxim is flouted there must be an implicature to save the utterance from simply appearing to be a faulty contribution to a conversation.  Consider these four sentences examples taken from the previous post, Grice's Cooperative Principle:


(1)  A: What time is it?
      B: It's two a'clock, in fact it's four pass two, and now it's Sunday.


Maxim of quantity and its implicature occur when the speaker or the writer conveys messages that are not as informative as they are required or the information is too much and unnecessary. B flouts the maxim of quantity, since he gives too much information to A, while too much information can distract the listener. However, it is not very difficult to recover the implicature that B wants to show to A that he is a kind of "on time" person.


(2) A: What is the Capital City of Indonesia?
     B: I believe it's Bogor, or maybe Jakarta, Indonesia has wide territory. 


Maxim of quality and its implicature occur when your contribution one that is untrue or lack adequate evidence. B flouts the maxim of quality since he gives insincere answer for A's question. The implicature of this flouting maxim would be that B doesn't know exactly about Capital City of Indonesia.


(3) Mom: Have you done your homework?
     Son: My bicycle is broken mom. 


Maxim of relevance and its implicature arise when the speaker deviates from the particular topic being asked and discussed. The answer of the son is not answering the mother’s question. The son tries to direct his mother’s concern away from the question which she does not like. 


(4) It’s the taste


Maxims of manner and its implicature occur when the utterances are not brief, ambiguous, and obscure. Advertisements often flout the maxim of manner. The statement flouts maxim of manner because it is obscure. The utterances triggers an inference process in which the addressee looks for the likeliest that is relevant in the context that obtain – that the taste is good for people who favor Coca cola and bad for those who dislike it. 

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See also:
Grice's cooperative principle 
Cooperative Principle: Implicature
Cooperative Principle: Flouting Maxims
The Hedging of Maxims 

Cooperative Principle: The Concept of Implicature

The concept of implicature was first introduced by Grice (1975) as the answer to the meaning concern which is unable to be covered by the ordinary semantics. It is insufficient to use semantics to uncover the meaning of utterances. The inappropriateness of understanding of meaning of utterances much influences the achievement of the communication purpose. The purpose of communication is in order the massage the speaker wants to convey is accepted appropriately by the hearer. To understand precisely what is meant by the speaker in uttering the utterances in a conversation, it is very important to understand the concept of implicature.

In conversation, the utterances produced by either the speaker or hearer has explicit and implicit meaning. Explicit meaning can be understood both by predicting the semantic meaning of the words within the conversation and by understanding the syntactic structure of the language used in the conversation. In the other hand, to understand the implicit meaning in a conversation, the rules of semantics and syntactic of the language is insufficient. Therefore, the concept of implicature was introduced. According to Brown and Yule (1983) implicature is used to calculate what is suggested and meant by the speaker as a different thing from what he actually said explicitly.

Furthermore, Grice (1975) states that there are two kinds of implicature, those are: conventional implicature and conversational implicature. The difference between them is that the former depends on something other than what is truth-conditional in the conversational use, or meaning, of particular form of expression, whereas the latter derives from a set of more general principles which regulate the proper conduct of conversation.
In order to have complete understanding about the difference between conventional and conversational implicature, pay attention to the following are examples:

(i) Mary got pregnant and John was pleased
(ii) Mary got pregnant but John was pleased.

The difference between the two utterances above is in the conjunction ‘and’ and ‘but’. In (i), the conjunction used is ‘and’, thus it means that the Mary’s pregnancy makes John happy or pleased. In the other hand, in (ii), the conjunction used is ‘but ‘, which shows contradiction, thus, it can mean that Mary’s pregnancy makes John unhappy or not pleased. By understanding the different meaning between conjunction ‘and’ and ‘but’ well, therefore, the meaning of the utterances in (i) and (ii) are clearly understood since the meaning of them is exactly the same with the meaning of structure of the utterances. The above case is called conventional implicature, it is resulted from the understanding of an utterance based on the structures form of the utterance.

Conversational implicature, on the other hand, has more various meanings since understanding the meaning of the utterance much depend on the context in which the utterance occurs. The conversational implicature arises as a result of the cooperative principle violence. A conversational implicature is, therefore, something which is implied in conversation, that is, something which is left implicit in actual language use. The example of conversational implicature as follows:

A: Has John arrived?
B: There is a red car in the garage.

B’s answer for A’s question has an implicature that John usually drives a red car; B has seen that there is a red car, which John usually drives, in the garage. Therefore, B concludes that John has arrived.

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See also:
Grice's cooperative principle 
Cooperative Principle: Implicature
Cooperative Principle: Flouting Maxims
The Hedging of Maxims 

Austin’s Speech Act Theory

What is speech act: Brainstorming


Every word belonged to human language represents to the actual world, which means, there must be things, actions, or even characteristics in the actual world that can be seen, done, or  felt when you say the words. Just say the word ‘table’, it represents a thing made of wood usually has square shape and four legs which function as the pair of chair. You can see the thing  in the actual world, and of course in your mind there is an image about how the ‘table’ looks like. Or the word ‘walk’, you move from one place to another place by foot. The action is there, and it can be seen and done. Or the word hot, cool, beautiful, etc, they all have the same case since all of them can be felt directly in the actual world.


However, have you ever heard the word promise, command, suggest, advise, conratulate, etc? Can you see the particular action done by someone to refer to those? How is the form movement of the body? Can you imagine how the action represented by those words look like? Those words are called speech acts, that is language as action, which means by uttering the word you do the action, you are not just saying something but are actually doing something. If you say “get out of here!” actually you do command action, or “you should do this instead of that.” By uttering that sentence you perfom an action that is sugesting, or etc.


It is important to note that the utterence/sentence category that can be used to refer to speech act must be performative utterence/sentence.


You can perform at least three different kinds of act when you speak. There are locutionary act (as Searly called it utterence act) refers to the fact that you must use words and sentences if you are saying anything, illocutionary act refers to the intent of the speaker, and perlocutionary act refers to an act will be done by the heare as the respon to the locution and illocution.


Therefore, the utterence “get out of here!” has locution act: get out of here!, in which the illocution is commanding, and the perlocution will be the hearer leaves the room.
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See also:

• Austin's Speech Act Theory
• Performative vs. Constative Sentence
• Austin’s five categories of performative

Grice's Cooperative Principle

The Gricean cooperative principle refers to the concept of the philosopher Grice about the cooperation between speakers in using the maxims. The cooperative principle makes our contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which we are engaged. Levinson (1985) states that the Gricean cooperative principle is construed as a theory of communication; it has the interesting consequence that it gives an account of how communication might be achieved in the absence of any conventional means for expressing the intended message. A corollary is that it provides an account of how more can be communicated, in his rather strict sense of non-naturally meant, than what is actually said.


In sorting out the different conversations can be very complex. There are, however, four maxims that can be regarded as general principles in all conversations, those are:


(1) The Maxim of Quantity, try to make your contribution as informative as is required, in the other words, do not make your contribution more or less informative than is required;
Example of violation:
A: What time is it?
B: It's two a'clock, in fact it's four pass two, and now it's Sunday.


(2) The Maxim of Quality, try to make your contribution one that is true. At this point, to make your utterances understandable, you have to avoid saying something that you believe to be false or lack adequate evidence; 
Example of violation:
A: What is the Capital City of Indonesia?
B: I believe it's Bogor, or maybe Jakarta, Indonesia has wide territory. 


(3) The Maxim of Relevance, try to make your contributions relevant. It means you have to say some information which is related to the topic; 
Example of violation:
Mom: Have you done your homework?
Son: My bicycle is broken mom. 


(4)The Maxim of Manner, try to make your utterance as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and avoid obscurity and ambiguity. 
Example of violation:
"It’s the taste" (ads of Coca cola) 

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See also:
Grice's cooperative principle 
Cooperative Principle: Implicature
Cooperative Principle: Flouting Maxims
The Hedging of Maxims 

Discourse Deixis

Discourse deixis deals with the orientation in the text through the writer or the speaker, the relation of the text passages to the current utterance either as a head of time or past, forthcoming or simultaneous. It encodes reference to portions of the unfolding discourse in which the utterance is located (Levinson, 1983, p.62). It means that discourse deixis is deictic reference to a portion of a discourse relative to the speaker’s current location in the discourse, such as: above, below, last, previous, proceeding, next or following (usually used in texts) and this, that, there, next, last (usually used in utterances).

In spoken or written discourse, there is frequently occassion to refer to earlier or forthcoming segments of the discourse. Since discourse unfolds in time, it is natural to use temporal deictic terms to indicate the relation of the referred to to the temporal location of the present utterance in the discourse. But spatial terms are also often employed. Reference to parts of of a discourse which can only be interpreted by knowing where the current coding or receiving point is, are clearly deictic in character (Asher 1994, p.856).

Levinson (1983, p.85-86) added that discourse deixis should be distinguished from a related notion that of anaphora. Moreover, discourse deixis shares with anaphora and cataphora the capacity to function as a text cohesion device. As we noted, anaphora concerns with the use of a pronoun to refer to the same referent as some prior term. Anaphora can hold within sentences, across sentences, and across at speaking in a dialogue. Deictic or other referring expressions are often used to introduce a referent, and anaphoric pronouns are used to refer to the same entity thereafter. However, it is important to remember that deictic and anaphoric usages are not mutually exclusive. Therefore, in principle the distinction is clear: when a pronoun refers to a linguistic expression itself, it is discourse deictic. When a pronoun refers to the same entity as a prior linguistic expression refers to, it is anaphoric.

In other words, discourse deixis is an expression used to refer to certain discourse that contain the utterance or as a signal and its relations to surrounding text.

A. Person Deixis

B. Place Deixis

C. Time Deixis

D. Discourse Deixis

E. Social Deixis
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See also:
Deixis

Social Deixis

Social deixis does not deal with three main components (person, place and time) of the coordinate system of subjective orientation, but they show how different social rankings and the participants of communication utter relationships within society via language. Briefly, it is rather to refer to the level of relationship between people than to information.

Levinson (1983, p.90) stated that social deixis concerns with the aspects of sentences which reflect or establish or determined by certain realities of participants or the social situation in which the speech event occurs. He adds that there are two basic kinds of social deixis information that seems to be encoded in language around the world. They are: Relational social deixis and Absolute social deixis. Relational social deixis is a deictic reference to some social characteristic of referrent apart from any relative ranking of referents or deictic reference to a social relationship between the speaker and addressee. In English, relational social deixis may be a lexical items (e.g. my husband, teacher, cousin, etc), pronouns (you, her). Absolute social deixis is a deictic reference usually expressed in certain forms of address which will include no comparison of the ranking of the speaker and addresse. For examples: your highness, Mr. President, your majesty, etc.

Briefly, social deixis is a deictic expression used to distinct social status. Social deixis separated in to two kinds relational and absolute social deixis.
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 A. Person Deixis

B. Place Deixis

C. Time Deixis

D. Discourse Deixis

E. Social Deixis
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See also:
Deixis

Time Deixis

Time deixis is also called as temporal deixis. Renkema (1993, p.79) stated that time deixis is a reference to time relative to a temporal reference point and it is typically the moment of utterance. These language resources are the adjectives of time in the line….yesterday….now….tomorrow, and the verb tenses. The verb sometimes also has another function besides referring to a specific time.

Furthermore, Levinson (1993, p.73) said that the basis for systems of reckoning and measuring time in most languages seem to be the natural and prominent cycles of day and night, lunar months, season and years.

While, Grundy (2000, p.31-32) states another important time deixis is tense system. In fact, almost every sentence makes reference to an event time. Often this event time can only be determined in relation to the time of the utterance. Moreover, Yule (1996, 14-15) says that the basic type of temporal deixis in English is in the choice of verb tense. English only has two basic forms, the present and the past. For example:
a. I live here now.
b. I live there then.
The present tense is the proximal form as in (a) and the past tense is distal form as in (b).

The deictic items use reference can only be determined in relation to the time of the utterance in which they occur. Such as:
• This / last / next Monday / week / month / year.
• Now, then, ago, later, soon, before.
• Yesterday, today, tomorrow.
In other words, time deixis is an expression in relation to point to certain period when the utterances produced by the speaker.

 A. Person Deixis

B. Place Deixis

C. Time Deixis

D. Discourse Deixis

E. Social Deixis
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See also:
Deixis

Place Deixis

Place deixis is also described as spatial deixis, where the relative location of people and things is being indicated. Place deixis or spatial deixis usually expressed in this, these, there, here, that, and those. Place deixis can be described along many of the same parameters that apply to the time deixis. Therefore, those references to place can be absolute or relational in nature. Absolute references to place locate an object or person in a specific longitude and latitude, while relational references locate people and place in terms of each other and the speaker (Cummings 2005, p.26).

Levinson (1983, p.79) stated that place or space deixis concerns for the specification of locations to anchorage points in the speech event and typically the speaker, and there are two basic ways of referring objects by describing or naming them on the one hand and by locating them on the other. Alternatively, they can be deictically specified to the location of participants at the time of speaking. There are a proximal (close to the speaker) such as this, and these, and a distal (sometime close to the addressee) such as that, and those. Each may be used either as a pronoun or in a combination with noun.

Grundy (2000, p.28) add that there are three degrees of proximity is by no means uncommon, with some languages distinguishing proximity to the speaker and to the addressee. They are: here (proximal), there (distal), where (and the archaic hither, hence, thither, thence, wither, whence), left, right, up, down, above, below, in front, behind, come go, bring, and  take.

Briefly, place deixis is an expression used to show the location relative to the location of a participant in the speech even.

 A. Person Deixis

B. Place Deixis

C. Time Deixis

D. Discourse Deixis

E. Social Deixis
 ...................................................................................
See also:
Deixis

Deixis Theory Proposed by Stephen C. Levinson

There are four kinds of deixis proposed by Levinson, they are:
A. Person Deixis
In many languages, person deixis can also contain other meaning elements like the gender of the third person. In addition, to pronoun and agreeing predicates, person, or participant-role is marked in various other ways. Person deixis concerns with the encoding of the role of participants in the speech even in which the utterance in question is delivered. Yule (1996, p.9-10) describe that person deixis involves the speaker and the addressee and operates in a basic three-part division they are:

a) First person (I). The first person deixis is a reference that refers to the speaker or both speaker and referent grouped with the speaker which is expressed in singular pronouns (I, me, myself, mine) and plural pronouns (we, us, ourselves, our, ours). The first person deixis can be divided into exclusive first person deixis, which refers to a group including addressee.

b) Second person (you). The second person deixis is a deictic reference to a person or persons identified as addressee, such as you, yourself, yourselves, your, yours.

c) And the third person (He, She, It). Third person deixis is a deictic reference to a referent(s) not identified as the speaker or addressee and usually imply to the gender that the utterance refers to, for example: he, she, and they, him, himself, her, herself.

Renkema (1993, p.77) adds that person deixis is realized with personal pronouns. The speaker as the first person (I) direct the utterance to the listener as second person (You), and conclude be talking about a third person (He, She, and It).

In other words, person deixis is described as expression in which to refer to person who the speakers intend to refer.

 A. Person Deixis

B. Place Deixis

C. Time Deixis

D. Discourse Deixis

E. Social Deixis
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See also:
Deixis

Deixis

Deixis deals with connections between discourse and the situation in which discourse is used. The term of ‘deixis’ is derived from the Greek word which mean ‘to show’ or ‘to indicate’ used to denote the elements in a language which refer directly to the situation. Moore (2001, 14) give definition about deixis as follows:

"Deixis is an important field of language study in its own right and very important for learners of languages. But it has some relevance to analysis of conversation and pragmatics. It is often and best described as "verbal pointing", that is to say pointing by means of language. The linguistic forms of this pointing are called deictic expressions, deictic markers or deictic words; they are also sometimes called indexicals."

Moreover, deixis is a technical term (from Greek) for one of the most basic things we do with utterance. Or it can be said ‘pointing’ via language. Essentially language, deixis concerns with the ways in which the interpretation of utterance depends on the analysis of that context of utterance.

In English, according to Yule (1996, p.93) there are three different ways to point out in. They are gesture, symbolic and anaphoric. Gesture is used by which it can be properly interpreted only by somebody who is monitoring some physical aspects of communication situation. Example: I want you to copy this paper. Symbolic use of deictic expression means that the interpretation involves merely knowing certain aspects of the speech communication situation, whether this knowledge comes by common perception or not. For example: I want you to put the paper there. Anaphoric is the use of expression that can be correctly interpreted by knowing what other portions of the same discourse that expression is co-referential with anaphoric use of an expression, which can be seen in the sentence; I have copied the paper and I put it there.


A. Person Deixis

B. Place Deixis

C. Time Deixis

D. Discourse Deixis

E. Social Deixis
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See also:
Deixis

Performative vs. Constative Sentence

Philosophically sentence is devided into two categories, performative and constative. Performative is a sentence which does not describe nor affirm about fact but contains a felicity condition, that is a certain condition that have to be fulfilled when the perform takes place. There are five characteristics of performative sentence, they are:

(1) The subject of performative sentence must be in the form of first person pronoun;

(2) The verb must be in the same category with performative verbs such as tell, say, demand, advice, ask etc.;

(3) The object of performative sentence is always a second person pronoun;

(4) It must be in the form of affirmative not negative;

(5) It must be in the form of present tense.

e.g. Stand up!

Note:

- The deep structure of the above sentence before encountering modification (become imperative) is

"I command you to stand up."

- Felicity condition of the above sentence:

¢Your addressee is sitting, or laying, or ducking, etc.

¢Your addressee has ability to stand (not cripple)

On the other hand, constative sentence is a sentence which affirms about fact, reports events, and describes situation and condition. It must contain truth values.

e.g.  Prices slumped.


The sentence is true if the fact in the actual world the prices are slumped. If in fact they are not slumped, you can simply say that the sentence is false.

However, when you take a look constative deeper, you will find that it also fulfills the five criteria of perfomative sentence, since the above example of constative sentence is only in the level of surface structure, in deep structure, it will become: “I tell you that price slumped”. In this form the constative sentence also has the all criteria take to become a performative sentence. Therefore, in short we can simply say that constative sentence is also included into performative sentence. You will find the reflection of the principle of maximum ease of articulation in this pattern. The metrical sentence “I tell you …” is unnecessarily to say, so that it is omitted. A sentence “I tell you that prices slumped” encounters a modification or a deletion process in the phrase “I tell you …” it appears only the surface structure “prices slumped”. Other examples of this phenomenon are that:

See Also:

===========================================

• RULE OF NATURE REFLECTED IN LANGUAGE USAGE
• Assimilation
• Apocope
• Syncope
• Lenition
• Clipping
• Blending
• Performative Sentence
• Imperative Sentence
• Ellipsis Sentence
• Metaphor

Classroom Discussions and Pragmatics

It is generally accepted that classroom interaction can facilitate students’ language development and communicative competence (Yu, 2008). The most common proposition of the role of classroom interaction is its contribution to language development simply by providing target language practice opportunities. According to Allright (1984), it is the process whereby classroom language learning is managed. In the language classroom the process of negotiation involved in interaction is itself to be identified with the process of language learning. The notion of negotiation is generally defined as ‘discussion to reach agreement’. Learners acquire linguistic knowledge and ability through the interaction.

Furthermore, one of the classroom interaction patterns is classroom discussion, which Yu (2008) considers it as a productive teaching technique. Discussion can be a powerful means of allowing students to engage actively with course material and develop their own views based on sound critical thinking. Barton et al (2004) argue classroom discussion functions best when students are talking to students. Indeed, our goal is to get as many students involved in talking to one another as possible and for the teacher to fade into the background. Students are well practiced in how to talk to and listen to teachers, in how to address and look to authority figures for answers. But they are not well versed in how to talk to and listen to each other, in how to navigate and negotiate and discuss issues of serious consequence and work toward answers among equals.

From the perspectives of applied linguistics, Liu (2007) states that more and more focus has been put on communicative language teaching, or communicative approach, an approach to foreign or second language teaching that emphasizes communicative competence as the goal of language learning. Communicative competence refers to the ability not only to apply the grammatical rules of a language in order to form grammatically correct sentences but also to know when and where to use these sentences and to whom. And there are still some other terms thought to be more effective in describing what it means to know and to be able to use language knowledge. One of these is Bachman’s (1990) communicative language ability and pragmatic competence. Pragmatic competence is generally considered to involve not only the ability of knowing how to use the language but also how to select the language forms to use in different settings, and with people in different roles and with different status.

Moreover, Nunn (2004) states that pragmatics has much, possibly more, to tell us about communication in the educational contexts where so many of us spend so much of our lives communicating and where communication is of the essence. Harlig & Taylor (1999) states that pragmatics explores the ability of language users to match utterances with contexts in which they are appropriate. In the other words, pragmatics is "the study of linguistic acts and the contexts in which they are performed". The main purpose of pragmatics, in the relation to language teaching is to facilitate the learners’ sense of being able to find socially appropriate language for the situations that they encounter. Within second language studies and teaching, pragmatics encompasses speech acts, conversational structure, conversational implicature, conversational management, discourse organization, and sociolinguistic aspects of language use such as choice of address forms.

Regarding the conversational implicature, Grice’s maxims, which are intended to be seen as a set of rules to be obeyed, could serve as useful guiding principles for teachers. Teachers, or students, as normal human beings, deliberately flout them, or unwittingly violate them. Experienced teachers could usefully make conscious attempts to self-observe, applying Grice’s maxims to their spoken communication with students and might also want to consider them as means of making written communication more efficient.

Politeness strategies

According to Brown and Levinson (1990) politeness strategies are developed in order to save the hearers' "face" Face refers to the respect that an individual has and maintenance that "self-esteem" in public or in private situations. Or simply we can say that 'face' refers to the image that a person projects in his social contacts with others. Usually you try to avoid embarrassing the other person, or making them feel uncomfortable. Since every participant in the social process has the need to be appreciated by others and the need to be free and not interfered with. The need to be appreciated is called 'positive face' and the need to not be disturbed refers to 'negative face. Face Threatening Acts (FTA's) are acts that infringe on the hearers' need to maintain his/her self esteem, and be respected.

• The bald on-record strategy does nothing to minimize threats to the hearer's “face”

• The positive politeness strategy shows you recognize that your hearer has a desire to be respected. It also confirms that the relationship is friendly and expresses group reciprocity

• The negative politeness strategy also recognizes the hearer's face. But it also recognizes that you are in some way imposing on them. Some other examples would be to say, “I don't want to bother you but...” or “I was wondering if...”

• Off-record indirect strategies the main purpose is to take some of the pressure off of you. You are trying to avoid the direct Face Threatening Act of asking something.