Violating a Maxim

In linguistics, 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 these hidden meanings ‘implicatures’.

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 assume everyone follows when they contribute to a conversation:

• Maxim of Quality
• Maxim of Quantity
• Maxim of Relation
• Maxim of Manner

You can violate any of these maxims. All that matters is that you’re breaking them on purpose and you want to hide that fact from the other people in the conversation (your interlocutors).

Note: You should only talk about Grice’s Maxims when there are at least two people involved in the conversation. It is most useful when both people are speaking and listening to one another. It’s not really something you’d talk about for the narration of a novel, for example, because the narrator is communicating, but the reader isn’t speaking back. You can mention maxims violated in the dialogue, though!

Violating the different maxims

People violate maxims for all sorts of reasons. It will mostly depend on the context of the conversation (pragmatics), 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’re breaking.

So, it’s useful to look at lots of different examples of maxim violations until you start to notice patterns emerging – especially if you can find someone who explains what’s happening using these linguistic terms and helps you understand the process more!

That’s why I recommend checking out our Community. We’re keen to grow our Linguistics and Language and Literature spaces, so we would be delighted to see you join! There, you can keep up with the more spontaneous conversations we have about language.

I’ve got plenty to say about where we might see maxim violations, both in literature and the real world. For example, there are some interesting things to be said about the language of politicians. And I’m dying to chat about all of this!

In fact, I’ve got an example of a violation of the maxim of quantity up on there right now!

But right now, let’s get you through the basics. So, let’s look through each of the four maxims individually and see how you might violate them in a conversation. I also recommend you check out the separate glossary entries for each maxim! We try to update them regularly with new examples of all kinds of violations we find!

Maxim of Quality

The maxim of quality is our expectation that people in a conversation will be truthful. Do, saying that they ‘violated the maxim of quality’ is a fancy way of saying that they lied.

Achieving this violation is self-explanatory. It’s about getting away with not telling the truth; passing something under your interlocutor’s nose without them noticing. You want to fool them into believing what you’re saying, rather than focusing on any inconsistencies or clues that might reveal that you’re lying.

This makes it quite different from flouting the maxim of quality, when you might change your tone of voice or emphasise particular words to show you’re being sarcastic or ironic. That’s because when you’re flouting a maxim, you want your interlocutor to notice and generate an implicature. So, you’re going to use all the non-linguistic and and paralinguistic tools at your disposal for them to catch on.

On the other hand, when you violate the maxim of quality, you try not to give anything away with your body language, facial expression, tone and other non-linguistic or paralinguistic cues. You try to keep them all as neutral and natural as they would be if you were telling the truth.

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 other types of violations!

Plus, ‘lying’ doesn’t count as terminology in an A-level English Language and Literature exam. ‘Violating the maxim of quality’ does. So, it’s an easy way to make sure you’re getting the marks you deserve – especially when you’re talking about a play!

Maxim of quantity

The maxim of quantity is interesting. When you hear it, you might be inclined to assum it’s 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 all the details that they’d expect to get from you in that context? Or are you giving them too much or too little information?

When people violate this maxim, they often give you something that seems to be enough info on the surgace. They disguise it by using the right words and perhaps speaking too facst so you won’t notice. Really, they’re either being economical with the truth of saying too much to deceive you.

I noticed this great example when I was watching season 2 of Netflix’s show, Wednesday:

The driving instructor asks the titular Wednesday if she has any driving experience. That triggers a flashback of her as a child, acting as the getaway driver for her uncle after he has robbed a bank. So, we know that 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. It definitely is by Addams family standards. I mean, of course, her uncle considers robbing a bank to be an ‘errand’! But for us, it seems like a complete understatement. She’s underplaying her expectience, which we might call ‘meiosis’.

But why would we consider it to be giving too little information? Well, the driving instructor asks this question so that he can predict what teaching her to drive will be like. Since she gave such an understated answer, she hasn’t given him the information he needs to actually figure that out. That’s why it counts as a violation of the maxim of quantity – and dramatic irony on top of that!

You can also violate this maxim by providing too much information! For example, if you say something that you don’t want people to focus on, you might overload them with all the little details to stop them from paying too much attention. This is a type of ‘burying’, which is the opposite of foregrounding.

Maxim of relation

Then we have the maxim of relation. When someone violates this maxim, they try to get away with giving their interlocutor a piece of information that’s irrelevant to the discussion. So, to discover when someone has done it, ask yourself: has what they said actually answered the question? Is it relevant to the discussion?

Of course, people who are violating this maxim are trying to get away with it. Just like the others we’ve discussed, they don’t want anyone to norice! So, they’ll often use words that are connected to the topic to fool their interluctors. That way, they seem like they’re making a relevant contribution to the conversation, even when they secretly arent.

It’s a common tactic that politicians use! It helps them to avoid answering difficult questions or engaging in uncomfortable conversations that could hurt their political campaign. At the same time, if anyone realises later on, they won’t get caught in a lie. As long as no one notices, it’s basically the best way to save their faces.

A good example of this comes from the former Conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak:

At the beginning of the video, the interviewer asks Sunak if he’s registered with a private GP. He replies:

My dad was a doctor. I grew up in an NHS family.

The interviewer didn’t ask him about his dad’s job or his family! She asked if he personally has used the NHS in the past and if he’s still registered with an NHS GP right now. So, his answer is completely irrelevant! Just because his dad worked as a doctor, it doesn’t mean they used the NHS!

So, 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!

Let’s keep watching to figure that out. When the journalist calls him out on the fact that he didn’t answer the question, he stammers and then more openly refuses to answer:

As a general concept, I wouldn’t really talk about me or my family’s healthcare situation.

That makes it pretty clear to me that he was trying to avoid answering the original question. He hoped that he could get away with not generating any hidden implicatures if he used the right words and sounded like he was answering the question.

Sure, it didn’t work, and the interviewer noticed straight away. In fact, the whole of the media and public did! There were articles about how he refused to say if he used private healthcare. So clearly, everyone saw right through his answer!

But that doesn’t stop the fact that he was definitely trying to get away with providing his dad’s career history as an answer to a quesiton about his choices. So, he’s violating the maxim.

Maxim of manner

People often confuse the maxim of manner with the maxim of quantity. That’s understandable, since they both concern how much you contribute to a conversation. However, there is a big difference.

The maxim of quantity is about how much information you provide. The maxim of manner is about how clear you are when you communicate.

So, to abide by the maxim of manner, you need to make sure that you’re being clear and concise, and arrange the words in a logical order. If you break this maxim, it’s still possible for you to be truthful, relevant and to provide the right amount of information! Its just that the way you say it confuses your interlocutors.

When someone violates this maxim, they speak in an unclear manner that muddles up what they are saying.

It’s similar to flouting the maxim of manner in that you’re doing it on purpose. The difference is that you’re trying to hide the fact that you’re breaking the maxim to confuse or mislead the other people in the conversation.

Here’s an example:

Teacher: Did you see Miriam in the playground at break?

Student: That might have perhaps been a possibility since I saw someone who perhaps looks like Miriam among quite a few students playing in the playground at break time.

Let’s say that the student is telling the truth: they aren’t completely sure, but they might have seen Miriam. Well, their answer is truthful, relevant and gives enough information.

A normal version of this answer might look something like this:

Student: I think I saw her, but I’m not completely sure because there were a lot of other students nearby.

So the answer isn’t breaking the maxim of quantity either, right? Since the student isn’t providing any extra, unnecessary information. The fact that the student mentions that there were other students around helps to explain why they aren’t sure; it’s not unnecessary.

However, the student does use a lot of hedging and over-explains themselves. The sentence is overly long and repeats what the teacher has already said (‘in the playground at break’).

This makes their answer quite unclear. If they weren’t sure, it would have been more simple to just say so!

To be honest, an example of this maxim was the most difficult for me to come up with. That’s because it’s really easy to hide the fact that you’re waffling or being unclear in your speech! Usually, it’s obvious that you’re doing it, so you’re going to naturaly generate an implicature. Plus, waffling usually means you end up giving extra info! So, you’ll 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 analyse them! After all, some of them can be quite similar. Plus, people often break more than one at the same time – particularly the maxims of quantity and manner. That makes it hard to tell the difference.

Let me be honest with you: 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 about pragmatics: being able to understand important things based on the context of the conversation and the relationships between the different interlocutors.

So, you shouldn’t expect yourself to be 100% confident any time soon. In fact, even now, I have to remind myself of what each maxim is before I identify them in a text! Then, when I’ve spoken about them for a while, I’ll come back with fresh eyes on another day and notice I’ve got someting wrong!

But the more you practice, the easier it will become.

Personally, there are a few questions I ask myself that are a really big help. It doesn’t mean I always hit the nail on the head, but it does point me in the right direction. These are:

• Is the speaker telling the truth?
• What kind of responses would I expect, given what I know about the context of the conversation?
• What makes the actual response different from any of the expected responses?

Of course, there are many different ways that someone could respond in a conversation. If there wasn’t conversations would get very dull and predictable. When I say I ‘expect’ a kind of response, I’m more talking about a rough idea of what the person could say. It’s not prescriptive; I’m not saying what facts I expect to hear.

So saying something unexpected is about being completely away from the norm. If that’s the case, it’s probably breaking one of the maxims.

That’s when I’ll compare my expected responses to the speaker’s actual response. Which of the expected responses is most like this one? How is it different from the closest expected response? That helps me massively!

The maxim of quantity vs the maxim of manner

As I said before, the two maxims I mix up the most are the maxim of quantity and then maxim of manner. There’s a lot of cross-over between them that makes it difficult to tell which one you’re breaking!

To make matters worse, it’s actually genuinely difficult to break the maxim of manner without also breaking the maxim of quantity along with it. It’s easier to do it the other way around, but once you start messing with the clarity of your sentence, it’s hard not to also mess with the amount of information you’re providing.

That’s why this glossary term took me so long to finish. I spent days trying to come up with some clear examples of violating the maxim of manner. It got to the point where I had to pause, come back to it with fresh eyes a couple of days later, and get lots of help from other people.

Of course, the most important thing to be aware of is the thing I said earlier:

The maxim of quality is about how much information you give. The maxim of manner is about how clear you are.

In other words, you can give your interlocutor exactly the amount of information they need (nothing more, nothing less) and break the maxim of manner by being overly wordy in your answer. You can also give too much or too little information and still communicate in a clear and concise way that doesnt flout or violate the maxim of manner.

But most of the time, you’re going to do both at once. It’s natural for you to communicate extra information when you’re being too wordy with your contribution to a conversation. And giving too little information usually goes hand-in-hand with an overly blunt contribution that isn’t wordy enough.

And then you bring in the maxim of relation. If you’re giving too much info, you’re probably also being irrelevant, right? So they’re all connected!

But the important thing to think about is which maxim break is the most important. Is it more important that the speaker has violated the maxim of quantity or the maxim of manner? Which one gives you the most to talk about?

Is it still called ‘violating a maxim’ if people notice?

In one of my examples earlier, you might have noticed that the journalist called Rishi Sunak out for avoiding the question. She noticed his attempt to violate the maxim of relation and insisted that he answer the question she asked. So clearly Sunak did generate some implicatures there! Yet I still said he was violating a maxim.

So, you might be wondering: if violating a maxim is when you try to hide it from your interlocutor and avoid implicatures, does it still count if they realise what you’re doing?

Well, the good news is that this part isn’t too complicated:

Violating maxims is all about the speaker’s intentions. If they were hoping that other people in the conversation didn’t notice and took steps to avoid anyone detecting anything, it counts as a violation whether it worked or not.

Grice hasn’t been too mean on this one. It’s one place where Grice’s Maxims are still 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 acheive.

This is true of all the different ways that you can break a maxim. We’d still say that you’re flouting the maxim of quality, even if your interlocutor didn’t notice the sarcasm. And it still counts as suspending a maxim even if you and the other people in the conversation come from different cultures and have different norms around appropriate speech.

On top of that, we can’t really talk about someone violating a maxim if we don’t notice it, right? Someone has to notice the violation for us to analyse it. Otherwise, we’d just think the speaker was following Grice’s Maxims and move on to analyse another part of the conversation.

But this does mean that you need to guess the speaker’s intentions quite a bit. I mean, it’s rare that you’d be able to ask the speaker if they were breaking the maxim on purpose and if they wanted other people to realise it.

Sometimes, they’re not around to answer. Other times, they wouldn’t tell you even if you asked – especially if they were violating a maxim to begin with! And even if you could ask them and they would answer truthfully? The likelihood of them understanding what you’re talking about is pretty small.

And then there’s the fact that a lot of the time, we’re doing this Cooperative Principle work on fictional characters in literature.

So, we have to base our analysis on the norms of language. It’s up to us to consider how people sound and act when they’re violating a maxim. We need to think about how this is different from when they’re flouting maxims and come to educated, informed conclusions.

Why is it so important to understand when someone is violating a maxim?

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, since a huge part of your exam revolves around analysing how language choices result in meanings.

Plus, you are expected to be able to analyse non-literary texts, too! In those kinds of texts, you can say a great deal about a speaker flouting or violating a maxim. It’s much more useful than counting the similes and metaphors or analysing the phonemes!

For example, Edexcel used to include the infamous interview between Princess Diana and Martin Bashir in their Voices in Speech and Writing anthology. The students in my school used to sit this as their English A-level, so I used to love teaching students about where Diana flouts maxims and how it generates implicatures that make you realise she has to be careful with her words.

Interviews are full of examples of people flouting, violating or suspending Grice’s Maxims! So, even though I understand why they removed the text, it’s a shame because of how rich it is in things to analyse.

Then there are plays. Since they’re made up of mostly dialogue, you’ll find people breaking and following the Cooperative Principle everywhere! In fact, I would argue that it’s easier to notice when someone has violated a maxim in a play than in real life, since the language is more intentional and edited.

Plus, we tend to know and see more than the other characters! So, we have dramatic irony on our sides! That means we’re more likely to be aware of a character violating a maxim, even when they don’t want the other characters to know.

There are loads of academic essays out there that analyse Grice’s Maxims in plays. That’s because analysing the maxims helps to explain why different audiences get the impressions they do from characters and situations. We can talk about how the way an actor delivers a line changes whether the character is flouting or violating a maxim, too!

Plus, it’s much more useful for analysing the relationships between characters than, say, picking out single words or analysing semantic fields.

There are loads of essays online that cover Grice’s Maxims in 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, it’s only useful if you’re saying something interesting. It can be useful to mention when a speaker flouts or violates a maxim in a text. However, unless you add analysis to explain why it matters, you’re just feature-spotting. We want to avoid that in our essays!

Other ways to break Grice’s Maxims

While this glossary article focuses on violating maxims, that’s not the only way that you can break the expectations set out by the Cooperative Principle. The type of maxim break depends on a few major things:

• Did you do it deliberately?
• Did you want your interlocutor(s) to notice?
• Is it expected of you to follow the maxims in that specific situation?

Depending on how you answer those questions, the way that you’re breaking the maxim could be different.

Other ways that you could break maxims include:

• Flouting (the most popular one to talk about when doing analysis)
• Infringing
• Suspending
• Hedging
• Opting out

It’s useful to know all of them! You don’t have to learn all the individual names, but it is useful to know how flouting and violating look different from the other types so that you don’t mix them up when you’re analysing a text.

In the grand scheme of things, though, you probably won’t use all of them in your essays. You might choose to focus on the ones that end up foregrounding important details 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 would be nothing to analyse!

That’s why it’s most common to focus on when a maxim has been flouted. In those cases, the speaker deliberately foregrounds their language. They want their interlocutors to analyse their words. So, there’s much more to say!

Where can you learn more?

This glossary term has hopefully given you the essential information you need to understand maxim violations. However, you should never just rely on one source when you’re finding out something new! You should consult multiple sources because each one will explain things in different words, making the idea stick 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

Plus, I recommend joining the Shani’s Tutoring Community! It’s a great way to secure your understanding. You can ask questions, give extracts of your texts for us to look at together, and see how accurate your understanding of violating maxims truly is.