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Grice's Cooperative Principle
Task C - Our answer
The first thing we need to take account of is that, because this is part
of a play, there are two levels of discourse (author-audience and character-character)
at which maxims may be broken, and that the character of the break may
not be the same at the two different levels.
At the character-character level in terms of the relation between Algernon
and his aunt, Algernon VIOLATES the maxim of QUALITY a large number of
times in a very short space. It is not a great bore for him, it is not
a disappointment for him, he has not received a telegram, there is no
friend called Bunbury, and so he can't be ill, and there are no 'they'
suggesting that he should hasten to Bunbury's side. And it is clear that
Lady Bracknell is not meant to know that he is not telling the truth.
However, at the author-audience level, and also at the character-character
level in terms of the relation between Algernon and his friend, Jack (note
the stage direction), what we see here is not a VIOLATION but a FLOUT.
Hence we conclude that Oscar Wilde is showing us that Algernon is tricking
Lady Bracknell, and Algernon is also displaying that trickery to Jack.
It is also worth noting that the maxim of MANNER is also broken during
this speech. Algernon is over-wordy (he does not need to say 'I need hardly
say' or 'the fact is' in order to get his message over, and he would also
be less obscure if he omitted 'seem to' in the last sentence as well.
These breaks look like FLOUTS at both discourse levels, but with different
implicatures. They must be noticeable to Lady Bracknell, who is likely
to interpret them as indicating Algernon's sadness at having to break
one social commitment for another. But because of the context of the QUALITY
FLOUTS at the author-audience level that we have already noticed, we can
see that they also amount to an indication (to us by Wilde and to Jack
by Algernon) of Algernon's verbal plausibility as he tricks his aunt.
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