Journal of English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics ISSN: 2707-756X DOI: 10.32996/jeltal Journal Homepage: www.al-kindipublisher.com/index.php/jeltal Page | 32 The Application of Grice Maxims in Conversation: A Pragmatic Study Md. Mahroof Hossain Assistant Professor, Department of English, Z.H Sikder University of Science & Technology, Kartikpur, Bhedergonj, Shariatpur, Bangladesh Corresponding Author: Md.Mahroof Hossain, E-mail: mahroof.hossainsarker@gmail.com ARTICLE INFORMATION ABSTRACT Received: August 17, 2021 Accepted: September 22, 2021 Volume: 3 Issue: 10 DOI: 10.32996/jeltal.2021.3.10.4 In every individual’s life, communicating and interacting with others is vital for carrying out a healthy social and professional relationship. Strictly speaking, we, you and I communicate with one another in our day-to-day life and simply understand each other. Paul Grice’s has presented his cooperative principle theory to explain our day-to-day life conversation. This article aims to review the basic Grecian theory of conversational implicature, identifying important consequences, known problems, and useful extensions or modifications. This paper is about how people should consider meeting the cooperative principle in order to perform successfully in communication which is based mainly on Paul Grice’s theory of implicature which is considered one of the most important contributions to pragmatics. KEYWORDS Cooperative principle, Conversation, Maxims, Flouting, Communication, Violation 1. Introduction 1 In pragmatics, the major aim of communication is considered the exchange of information. People usually cooperate to convey their intentions and implicit import of their utterances. Therefore, all things being equal, conversations are cooperative attempts based on common ground and pausing a shared purpose. Grice’s work on the cooperative principle led to the development of ‘pragmatics’ as a separate discipline within linguistics. Consider the following, taken from Fais (1994) “One of the defining features of conversation is that it is cooperative in nature.” (Fais, 1994:231-242) The distinction between what is said and what is meant was Austin’s core idea of his early theory in pragmatics. Later on, Gr ice, who is mainly Austin’s student has made an attempt to go further. That is, to systematize how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant, from expressed meaning to implied meaning. Paul Grice, a British philosopher of language, formulated what is now called the cooperative principle. “Make your conversati on contribution 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’ (1975, 45). In his William James lectures at Harvard Oxford universities in 1967, Grice explicates the cooperative principle and he pays attention to limit the use of it for describing talk exchanges presenting the following features. “ The participants have some common immediate aim, the contributions of the participants are dovetailed mutually dependent; there is some sort of understanding that other things being equal, the transaction should continue inappropriate style unless both parties are agreeable that it should terminate.” (Grice, 1989; 31) Grice (1989, 29) considers that Published by Al-Kindi Center for Research and Development, United Kingdom. Copyright (c) the author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license