Violating a maxim is when you break one of Grice’s Maxims on purpose, but you don’t want anyone else to notice. You’re hoping that the other people in the conversation will think you haven’t broken any maxims at all, so they won’t interpret any hidden meanings in your words. We call a hidden meaning like this an ‘implicature’.
Note: This is different from flouting a maxim, which is when you want the other people in the conversation to notice and generate an implicature.
Grice’s Maxims (otherwise known as the Cooperative Principle) are a set of four expectations that people naturally have when they’re listening to someone contribute to a conversation:
You can violate any of these maxims. All that matters is that you’re breaking them on purpose, and that you want to hide that fact from the other people in the conversation (your interlocutors). You’re stealthily hiding implicatures in what you’re saying.
Note: You can only talk about Grice’s Maxims when there are at least two people involved in a conversation. They both need to be speaking and listening to one another. That means that you wouldn’t really talk about a novel writer violating a maxim to their reader, but you might mention maxims violated in the dialogue.
Violating the different maxims
People violate maxims for all sorts of reasons. It depends largely on the context of the conversation (pragmatics), as well as the motives of the speaker, and the relationship and power dynamics between the people involved.
It will also look different and involve different methods depending on which of the four maxims you choose to break.
Let’s have a look at each maxim one by one and see how you might violate them in a conversation. I’d also recommend that you check out the individual glossary entries for each maxim. We try to update them regularly with new examples of all kinds of maxim violations that we find!
You might also want to check out our community. We have growing Linguistics and Language and Literature spaces that you can join. There, you can keep up with all the more spontaneous conversations we have about language. I’ve got plenty to say about where we might see maxim violations in literature or the real world. For example, there are some interesting discussions to come about the language of politicians!
In fact, I’ve got another example of a violation of the maxim of quantity up on there right now!
Maxim of Quality
The maxim of quality is the expectation that we have that people in a conversation will be truthful. So, saying that they ‘violated the maxim of quality’ is a fancy way of saying that they lied.
To achieve this violation, you have to try to pass something untruthful under your interlocutor’s nose without them realising. You want them to believe what you’re saying and not focus on the fact that you’re not actually telling the truth. It’s about trying to fool them into believing you.
Your body language, facial expressions and other paralinguistic cues will be really different from when you’re flouting a maxim. If you were flouting this maxim, you might change your tone of voice or emphasise particular words to show you’re being sarcastic or ironic. That’s because you want your interlocutor to notice the flout and generate an implicature.
On the other hand, when you’re violating the maxim of quality, you’ll try to keep your facial expressions, body language and tone as natural as possible. You don’t want to draw attention to the lie with your paralanguage and accidentally make your interlocutors notice what you’re doing!
Since we already have the word ‘lie’ to describe this, you probably won’t hear many people using the phrase, ‘violating the maxim of quality’. However, it’s still useful to know it. After all, it will help you to spot and differentiate between the other types of violations!
Maxim of Quantity
The maxim of quantity is interesting. It might initially seem to be about how many words the speaker uses. However, that’s not the case at all!
In reality, the maxim of quantity is about how much information you give your interlocutor. Are you telling them the info they’d expect to get from you? Or are you giving them too many or too few details?
When people violate this maxim, they often give you something that seems to be enough info. They disguise it by using the right words and perhaps speaking fast so you won’t notice. Really, they’re either being economical with the truth or saying too much to deceive you.
A great example of this comes from season 2 of Netflix’s show Wednesday:
The driving instructor asks the titular Wednesday if she has any driving experience, and we see a flashback of her acting as the getaway car driver after her uncle has robbed a bank. Not only can she drive, but she’s actually been excellent at it for years!
But she responds with a generic, deadpan answer:
My uncle used to let me sit behind the wheel while we ran errands.
Technically, this answer is truthful, by Addams family standards. Of course, her uncle considers robbing a bank to be an ‘errand’! But the driving instructor is asking this question to predict what teaching her to drive will be like. So, she hasn’t given him enough information to actually figure that out. That’s why it counts as a violation of the maxim.
You can also violate this maxim by giving too much information! For example, if you say something that you don’t want people to focus on, you might overload them with other information to stop them from paying too much attention to it. We call this ‘burying’.
Maxim of Relation
Then you have the maxim of relation. When someone violates this maxim, they try to get away with giving their interlocutor a piece of information that is irrelevant to the discussion. So, ask yourself: has what they said answered your question? Has it been relevant to the discussion?
Of course, people who are violating this maxim are trying to get away with it. They don’t want anyone to notice! So, they will often use words connected to the topic. That way, they seem like they’re making a relevant contribution even if they aren’t.
It’s a common tactic among politicians! It helps them to avoid difficult topics without getting caught in a lie. If no one notices, then they’ve successfully been able to ignore a question that would have been bad for their careers. A good example of this is from the old prime minister, Rishi Sunak:
At the beginning of this video, the interviewer asks if he is registered with a private GP. Rishi Sunak replies:
‘My dad was a doctor. I grew up in an NHS family.’
The interviewer didn’t ask about Sunak’s dad or family. She asked if he uses private healthcare or the NHS right now. So, his answer is completely irrelevant. Based on that, we know that he broke the maxim of relation. Now we just need to figure out what kind of break it was!
When the journalist calls him out on the fact that he didn’t answer the question, he starts stammering and then more openly refuses to answer:
As a general concept, I wouldn’t really talk about me or my family’s healthcare situation.
This makes it pretty clear to me that he was trying to avoid answering. He hoped he could get away with not generating any hidden implicatures. Sure, it didn’t work and the interviewer noticed straight away, but he was definitely trying. So, he’s violating the maxim.
Maxim of Manner
People often confuse the maxims of manner and quanity. That’s understandable, since they both concern how much you contribute. However, there’s a big difference.
The maxim of quantity is about how much information you provide. The maxim of manner is about how clear you are.
So, to follow the maxim of manner, you need to be clear and concise, and arrange your words logically. If you break it, you can still be truthful and relevant. You still provide your interlocutor with enough information. It’s just that your words confuse them.
To violate this maxim, you need to speak in a way that isn’t clear and muddles what you’re saying. Like when you’re flouting a maxim, you’re doing it on purpose. Unlike flouting, though, you’re trying to hide what you’re doing to confuse or mislead people.
Let’s look at an example:
Teacher: Did you see Miriam in the playground at break?
Student: That might have perhaps been a possibility since I saw quite a few students playing in the playground at break time.
Let’s say that the student is telling the truth: they aren’t sure but they might have seen Miriam. Well, their answer is truthful, relevant and gives enough information. It also isn’t breaking the maxim of quantity, since they aren’t providing any extra, unnecessary information that the teacher didn’t already have. However, they use lots of hedging and over-explain themselves. Plus, they use extra words to repeat what the teacher has already said (‘in the playground at break’).
This makes their answer way more unclear. If they aren’t sure, they could have easily said ‘I’m not sure’.
This maxim was probably the most difficult for me to come up with examples of, since it’s really difficult to hide the fact that you’re waffling or being unclear in your speech! Usually it’s obvious that what you’re going to say will generate an implicature. Plus waffling also means you end up giving extra info and break the maxim of quantity, too!
How can you tell which maxim is being violated?
You’ve probably already noticed that it can be quite difficult to tell which maxim someone is violating. It’s normal to mix them up, especially when you’re just starting to think about them. After all, some of them can seem quite similar. Plus, when it comes to the maxims of quantity and manner, people often break them together. That makes it hard to tell the difference.
To be honest, working with Grice’s Maxims is never going to be as easy as spotting the difference between a simile and a metaphor. So much of it comes down to knowing the pragmatics: context of the conversation and the relationship between the interlocutors. So, you shouldn’t expect yourself to always be 100% confident. Even know, I have to remind myself of what each maxim is before I identify them in a text.
But the more you practice, the easier it will become.
Personally, there are a few questions I ask myself to help me. It doesn’t mean I’m always right, but it does help to point me in the right direction. These are:
- Is the speaker telling the truth?
- How would you usually expect someone to respond?
- What makes the expected response different from the actual response?
Of course, there lots of different ways someone might respond in a conversation. However, if it’s completely out there and out of the norm, it’s probably breaking one of the maxims. Then, I try to find an expected response that is as close as possible to the speaker’s actual response. That helps me massively!
The maxim of quantity vs the maxim of manner
The two maxims I mix up the most are the maxim of quantity and the maxim of manner. There’s a lot of cross-over between them, to it makes it difficult to tell which maxim you’re breaking.
To make matters stranger, it’s actually genuinely difficult to break one without breaking the manner. That’s why this glossary term has taken me so long to finish! I spend days trying to come up with some clear examples, gave up for a while, and then had to come back with fresh eyes and lots of help from other people.
Of course, the most important thing to be aware of is this:
The maxim of quantity is about how much information you give. The maxim of manner is about how clear you are.
That means that you can give your interlocutor exactly the amount of information they need (nothing more, nothing less) and break the maxim of quantity by being overly wordy in your answer. You can also give too much or too little information but still communicate in a clear, concise way.
But most of the time, you’re going to do both at once. Using too many words to communicate an idea usually comes with giving too much extra information. And giving too little information usually goes hand-in-hand with not being wordy enough.
And then you bring in the maxim of relation. If you’re giving us too much info, you’re probably also being irrelevant, right?
Is it still called ‘violating a maxim’ if people notice?
In my example earlier, you might have noticed that the journalist called Sunak out for avoiding the question. If so, you might be wondering: if violating a maxim is when you try to hide it from your interlocutor, does it still count if they realise what you’re doing?
Well, the good news is that this part isn’t too complicated:
It’s all about the speaker’s intentions. If they were hoping that the other people in the conversation didn’t notice, it counts as a violation whether it worked or not.
Grice hasn’t been too mean there. It’s one place where he’s kept it nice and simple for us. The rule doesn’t change based on how sharp, suspicious, gullible or unobservant the interlocutors are. It’s all about the speaker and what they’re trying to achieve.
This is true of all the different ways that you can break a maxim. You’re still flouting the maxim of quality if the person you’re talking to didn’t understand that you’re being sarcastic. And it still counts as suspending a maxim even if you and your conversation buddy come from different cultures and have different norms around which maxims count where.
But this also means that you need to be guessing speaker’s intentions an awful lot. I mean, you can’t always ask a speaker if they were breaking a maxim on purpose and if they wanted you to realise. Sometimes, they’re not around to answer. Other times, they’re fictional characters. Most of the time, they wouldn’t know what you were talking about even if you could ask them.
So, we have to base this on language norms: how do people sound and act when they they’re violating a maxim? How is it different when they’re flouting maxims? Asking those questions is the key.
Why is this so important to understand?
Grice’s Maxims are great for analysing texts where two or more people speak to one another. It’s particularly useful if you’re studying IB or A-level English Language and Literature, where part of the exam focuses on analysing non-literary texts.
For example, you could get an interview. Edexcel used to have the interview between Princess Diana and Martin Bashir in their anthology. At that time, I loved teaching students about where Diana was flouting maxims and how it created the implicature that she had to be careful with her words. Interviews are full of examples of Grice’s Maxims! So, even though I understand why they removed the text and agree to some extent, it is a shame because of how rich it is.
Then there are plays. Since they’re mostly dialogue, you’ll find people following and breaking the Cooperative Principle everywhere. I’d argue that it’s easier to notice when someone’s broken a maxim in a play than in real life, because the language is more intentional and edited.
There are loads of academic essays out there that analyse Grice’s Maxims in plays. That’s because the maxims help to explain why audiences get the impressions they do from characters and situations. Plus, they’re more useful for analysing relationships between characters than single words or semantic fields.
There are loads of essays about A-level set texts. The one by a student named Helena Becci from Nottingham on A Streetcar Named Desire is really easy to follow.
Of course, this is only useful if you’re saying something interesting. It can be useful to mention when someone’s flouting or violating a maxim in a text. However, unless you add analysis to explain why that’s important, you’re just feature spotting. We want to avoid that in our essays!
Other ways to break maxims
While this glossary entry is focused on violating maxims, that’s not the only way that you can go against the Cooperative Principle. It all depends on whether you did it deliberately, if you wanted your interlocutors to notice, and if you would be expected to follow the maxims in that specific situation.
The other ways you can break maxims include
- Flouting a maxim (the most popular one to talk about when you’re doing analysis).
- Infringing a maxim.
- Suspending a maxim.
- Hedging a maxim.
- Opting out of the maxims (saying something like ‘no comment’).
It’s useful to know all of them! However, you probably won’t use all of them when you’re writing. You might choose to focus more on the ones that end up foregrounding some important thing about the text. I mean, there’s no point in talking about how a character speaks exactly how we’d expect them to speak, right? There’d be nothing to analyse!
That’s why it’s the most common to talk about when a maxim has been flouted. The speaker is deliberately trying to foreground their language. They want you to analyse their words. So, there’s much more to say!
Where can you learn more?
Our glossary terms give you the essential information to understand maxim violations. However, it’s important that you look at multiple sources when you’re learning a new concept. Each time someone explains something to you in different words, it sticks in your head better.
Here are some amazing places that will help you to reinforce your knowledge of violating a maxim:
- Nottingham Stylistics Toolkit
- Language and Style at Lancaster University
- Language at Leeds
- Britannica
Joining the Shani’s Tutoring Community is a great way to secure your understanding, too! It means you can ask questions, give extracts of your work for us to analyse, and get useful feedback.
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