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Quantity
1. Make your contribution as informative as required (for the current purposes of the
exchange).
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than required.
The concept of being an expected amount of information provided in conversation is just
one aspect of the more general idea that people involved in a conversation will cooperate with
each other.
The maxim of quantity is is difficult for many people. In conversations, everyone should
have his or her "fair" share of talk time. No one should "hog" the floor without special
permission. In writing, some of us are very long-winded, while others are too brief. It is difficult
to judge exactly how much inferencing or "reading between the lines" we can ask our readers
to do. We want to be brief, but not so brief that our message isn't clear.

Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true.
1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Gricean maxim of truthfulness does not mean that you cannot tell a lie, but simply that a
cooperative conversationalist does not usually say other than what he or she believes to be
true.
When we violate truthfulness, we often do so using special intonation for sarcasm, for
teasing, or for playfulness, as in the following examples from Gough (1984). The first exchange
shows a father diverting a child's attention from an argument with his sibling by pretending a
muffin can fly:
F: Do you wanna half of a muffin? Here it comes (makes loud airplane noises as he
flies the muffin plane around the kitchen). Flyin'. (more airplane noises, then lands the
muffin plane on child's plate)
When the truth maxim is violated, speakers may, in fact, say so – that it's "just pretend."
The ability to take on another role in pretense appears very early in child development.
Learning how to move in and out of "truthfulness" with appropriate marking may be acquired
early in life, but the successful execution and recognition of irony, teasing, and joking is not an
easy matter even in adulthood. We assume, according to Grice's maxim, that contributions will
be truthful unless marked as deviations from that norm. The markings are not always easy for
language learners to recognize. Pretense, teasing, and joking may be quite difficult for many
learners.

Relevance: Be relevant.
Each person must make a contribution relevant to the topic. Communication messages
cannot be random, but must relate to what has gone before. Since we know that responses are
usually relevant, we can interpret the following service encounter exchange:
A: Do you have orange juice?
B: Large or small?
The requester infers that orange juice comes in either large or small containers. If the
requester replied "Large or small what?" the service person would be surprised. Contributions
need not be relevant to the previous utterance but, rather, relevant to the negotiated common
theme or focus of communication.
The topic, however, need not be the same for each participant. While we try to make our
contributions relevant to the topic of conversation, we may have our own personal topics that