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In:Patterns of Context: Modelling cultural and contextual influence in utterance interpretation
Edited by Elke Diedrichsen and Frank Liedtke
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 356] 2026
► pp. 76–99

The cooperative principle and goal schemas

At the foundations of human communication

 | University of Catania
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
Is it possible to account for the deep intersubjectivity (“ultra-sociality”) that is special to humans, in terms of the cognitive-individual notion of goal schemas? I provide a (partially) affirmative answer to this question, through an analysis of Grice’s Cooperative Principle based on that notion. On the one hand, goal schemas have a conceptual-predicative structure that is key to understanding pragmatic inferences, but also phenomena such as the embedding of utterances in activity types, and short-circuiting of implicatures. On the other hand, by incorporating affective evaluations, goal schemas may account for the social-cultural systems of motivations that shape individual subjects — well beyond the “motivation to share” that enable joint actions.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Schemas and goal schemas
    • 2.1Goal schemas in Grice: The cooperative principle
    • 2.2From grice to Levinson: Activity types
    • 2.3From Grice to Morgan: Conventions of usage
  • 3.Motivations
    • 3.1A cognitive model of motivation
    • 3.2Sharing motivations: A cognitive-anthropological model
    • 3.3From the motivation to share to sharing motivations
  • 4.Conclusions: The cooperative principle reloaded
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
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