Grice’s Conversational Maxims are described in this week’s Communicative Competence lecture. To assess how important these maxims actually are, have a conversation with a friend and violate one of the maxims. Have more conversations with other friends and violate different maxims. You must do this with at least three people and compare your participants’ responses. Write a thoughtful write-up of your findings that includes:
- A description of how your participants responded.
- Interesting insights you got from conducting the test, such as: Does disobeying the maxims actually cause your interactions to breakdown? Did one of the maxims appear to be more important than the others? What other insights did you gain about the maxims and/or children’s conversational development, or anything else you thought was important?
- Specific references to information covered in lecture and/or course readings that are related to the insights you discussed.