La significación social de las máximas de Grice: el caso del cómic alternativo inglés

Abstract

Grice’s proposals have aroused much interest in researchers during the last decade, especially since Sperber & Wilson applied those ideas to a new Principle of Relevance. Grice developed a set of conversational postulates –maxims in his terminology– that accounted for the speakers’ overall effort to develop their conversational interactions in a cooperative way (his so-called Cooperative Principle). In this article we propose a new application of Grice’s maxims in a medium which is both verbal and visual: English alternative comics. The main hypothesis underlying this paper is that comic artists, willing to outline a clearcut three-fold picture of English social classes (low, middle, high), tend to characterize their characters’ speech in such a way that Grice’s maxims are violated in class-specific ways according to what social stratum they belong to. Therefore, Grice’s maxims turn out to acquire a social significance which was not intended in Grice’s conversational maxims.