Volume 9 • Issue 1 • 1000325 Arts Social Sci J, an open access journal ISSN: 2151-6200 Research Article Open Access Arts and Social Sciences Journal A r t s a n d S o c i a l Sc i e n c e s J o u r n a l ISSN: 2151-6200 Igwedibia, Arts Social Sci J 2018, 9:1 DOI: 10.4172/2151-6200.1000325 Keywords: Conversational implicature; Pragmatics; Grice; Poems; Maxims; Cooperative principles; Audre Lorde; Context Introduction Experiences have shown that what people say or write is not always what they actually mean. Quite ofen, speakers’ or authors’ utterances or writings mean much more than what they actually literally say or write. For instance, a speaker who sends someone on an errand might say, “If you like, don’t come back today.” Tis statement might have the implied meaning of, “Return as soon as possible or come back very quickly.” Tis is in line with the view of Tomas [1] who posits that “people do not always or even usually say what they mean.” He illustrates this with these examples: “it’s hot in here’’ [1]. Tis statement is open to varying interpretations. For someone who came into a room with the windows shut, this might mean ‘please open the window.’ Or it might mean, ‘Is it alright if I open the window?’ Or ‘You’re wasting electricity.’ What someone says at times can be the complete opposite of what he or she means. Tomas suggests that people can mean something quite diferent from what their words suggest. Te preceding exposition lays out the problem of meaning in context, specifcally how context contributes to meaning. Grice, writing on the same subject, studies a sort of talk-in-interaction, raising questions such as: do speakers mean what they say, or say what they mean? In other words, he studies context-dependent aspects of meaning [2,3]. We will return to Grice momentarily. Meanwhile the present study seeks to investigate the features of the speech context embedded in the poetic lines in Audre Lorde’s poems, arguing that context helps determine which proposition is expressed by a given poetic line [4-6]. Te meaning of those lines can be regarded as a function from a context, including time, place, and possible worlds shared by both poet and readers, into a proposition, where, as Stalnaker argues, a proposition is a function from a possible world into a truth value [7]. In other words, the study investigates aspects of meaning involved in the interaction between a poetic expression’s context of utterance and the interpretation of elements within that expression. An important aspect of Audre Lorde’s language use in her poetry is one that takes context into account as an essential part in the construction of meaning [4]. Returning to Grice, one of his two most infuential contributions to the study of language and communication is his theory of meaning, which he began to develop in his article “Meaning,” written in 1948 but published only in 1957 at the prodding of his colleague, Strawson (Wikipedia) Grice further develop his theory of meaning in the 5 th and 6 th of his William James lectures on “Logic and Conversation,” delivered at Harvard in 1967. Tese two lectures were initially published as “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions” in 1969 and “Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word Meaning” in 1968, and were later collected with the other lectures as the frst section of Studies in the Way of Words in 1989. But Grice’s most groundbreaking contribution to philosophy and linguistics is his theory of implicature which started in his 1961 article, “Te Causal Teory of Perception,” and is most fully developed in his 1967 “Logic and Conversation.” According to Gric, what a speaker means by an utterance can be divided into what the speaker “says” and what the speaker thereby “implicates.” Tis results in what Grice calls Conversational Implicature. To conversationally implicate something, according to Grice, is to mean something that goes beyond what one says in such a way that it must be inferred from non-linguistic features of a conversational situation together with general principles of communication and cooperation. To Grice, a conversational implicature, is, therefore, something which is implied in conversation, that is, something which is lef implicit in actual language use. In other words, implicature provides some explicit account of how it is possible to mean more than what is actually said. Grice then goes on to propound his theory of implicature which he calls the Cooperative Principle. Te Cooperative Principle, according to Grice is a norm *Corresponding author: Dr. Adaoma Igwedibia, Department of English and Literary Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Enugu State, Nigeria, Tel: +2348036915201; E-mail: adaoma.igwedibia@unn.edu.ng Received December 21, 2017; Accepted December 29, 2017; Published January 02, 2018 Citation: Igwedibia A (2018) Audre Lorde’s Poems “A Woman Speaks” and “A Litany for Survival” towards a Gricean Theoretical Reading. Arts Social Sci J 9: 325. doi: 10.4172/2151-6200.1000325 Copyright: © 2018 Igwedibia A. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Audre Lorde’s Poems “A Woman Speaks” and “A Litany for Survival” towards a Gricean Theoretical Reading Adaoma Igwedibia* Department of English and Literary Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria Abstract A number of works have been done by scholars on the study and interpretation of Audre Lorde’s poems, especially through the lens of literary and critical analysis. However, Lorde’s poems have not been analyzed pragmatically. A lot may have been written about Lorde’s poetry, but there is absolutely no evidence of a pragmatics study of her work. Lorde is the author of many poems that have been studied in various theoretical dimensions, but none have been done with reference to their pragmatics implications. The problem which this research recognizes, therefore, is that Lorde’s poems, especially the those under the present study, have not been studied and interpreted using Grice’s theory of Conversational Implicature (Cooperative Principle) which comprised the four maxims: the maxims of Quantity, Quality, Manner and Relation. This study seeks to discover the extent to which these maxims could be applied to the reading of these selected poems of Lorde. It also seeks to ascertain the degree to which Lorde’s selected poems violate or adhere to these maxims. The study has found that Audre Lorde in some of her poems, violates the maxims as well as adheres to it both in the same breath.