English Markers of Explicating the Maxims of Grice’s Cooperative Principle AS A Discourse Management TOOL from a Cognitive Perspective
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17308/lic/1680-5755/2026/2/14-22Keywords:
metacommunication, Cooperative Principle, language corpus, cognitive interpretation, discourse-based management of understandingAbstract
The article examines English metacommunicative markers as means of managing discourse interpretation from a cognitive perspective. The aim of the study is to identify the mechanisms through which linguistic units explicate the cognitive expectations of communication participants and thereby operationalize the maxims of Paul Grice’s Cooperative Principle. The research distinguishes between metalanguage, which enables language to be described as an object; declarative metapragmatic comments; and procedural metacommunicative comments. The focus of the paper is on procedural metacommunicative comments, i.e., pragmaticalized constructions integrated into the fabric of the utterance and functioning as real-time instructions for its interpretation. It is demonstrated that these markers regulate parameters such as the amount of information, the degree of epistemic reliability, relevance, and thematic coherence, while also ensuring the cognitive transparency of discourse.The empirical basis of the study is the COCA corpus, which made it possible to conduct a quantitative and genre-stratified analysis of markers associated with the maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner. The corpus data reveal that the distribution of metacommunicative formulas depends on discourse type: blog and media registers are characterized by a high degree of reflexivity and explicit management of understanding, whereas academic communication tends to favor strategies of clarification, reformulation, and conceptual structuring.The article argues that the Cooperative Principle is realized not only implicitly, through adherence to conventional norms of communication, but also explicitly – through a system of verbalized cognitive instructions. Metacommunicative markers are interpreted as instruments for coordinating the interpretive efforts of speaker and addressee, ensuring both the maintenance of cooperativeness and the possibility of its strategic modeling or partial violation for pragmatic effect.
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