Analyze the following extract of a dialogue in terms of the related semantic and pragmatic theories.
“Hush, hush! He's a human being,” I said. “Be more charitable; there are worse men than he is yet!”
“He's not a human being,” she retorted, “and he has no claim on my charity. I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death, and flung it back to me.”
(Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights)
This dialogue violates the quality maxim of cooperative principle proposed by Grice. The main content of cooperative principle is the following: make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. And it contains four maxims.
Quantity
(1) Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
(2) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
Quality
Try to make your contribution one that is true.
(1) Do not say what you believe to be false.
(2) Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Relation
Be relevant
Manner
Be perspicuous.
(1) Avoid obscurity of expression.
(2) Avoid ambiguity.
(3) Be brief.
(4) Be orderly.
Apparently, this dialogue violates the quality maxim when the girl retorted that he is not a human being which is obviously false statement. Here the word “human being” is not used in its semantic meaning-a kind of creature that is biped, featherless, rational, etc. Instead, its meaning should be interpreted in context. And conversational implicature arise as the maxim is flouted. Conversational implicature is a kind of implied meaning, which is deduced on the basis of the conventional meaning of words together with the context, under the guidance of the CP and its maxims. Reading the whole dialogue, we can find the girl does not really mean he is an animal or other thing else. The remark here is to show he does not take her feeling seriously.