Noncompositional

Let’s talk the maxim of quantity. It’s one part of Grice’s cooperative principle that has most certainly withstood the test of time. (Don’t know who Grice is or why he came up with the maxim of quantity? As usual, check out the free encyclopedia as a starting point). The maxim is:

1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

The first part is really the crucial (the second part could probably be subsumed by some other of the maxims). One often-studied consequence of this maxim is what is called scalar implicature. Say you ask me how many cats I have, and I say “I have three cats.” If I have less than three, I’m lying; but if I have more than three, then I’m not strictly untruthful, but I’m certainly being uncooperative (if I hear “you must have three cats to qualify for VIP membership” I assume that having four or five is sufficient as well). That is, in many cases expressions of quantity are taken to be exact specifications.

The principle extends beyond numbers, though, to a sort of nebulous idea of “specificity” - that is, one should be as specific as required (but not too much). If one is less specific than people usually tend to be, something special is usually implicated. If I say “I drive a vehicle to work every day,” you might be inclined to think it’s not a car; If I say “I work in a man-made structure downtown,” something similar might happen. Now I will present a story that, I think, illustrates that people actually do this.

Someone I know had some car trouble the other day, and he called AAA for help. He said where he was and described to the dispatcher what he was wearing. They sent a tow truck out, but after driving around the area for a while and seemingly not seeing him, he flagged down the driver. The driver apologized — for not being able to help random people who flag them down! After my friend explained that he was in fact the person who called in, the truck driver said:

Oh, they told me to look for someone wearing a green jacket, not someone wearing an A’s jacket

That is, if the dispatcher knew he was wearing an A’s jacket they would have said so, it being a good identifying characteristic. He apparently took “green jacket” to mean “green jacket that’s not an A’s jacket.”