How to Pretend Things with Words: The Less You Have to Say the More You Talk

According to Gricean Pragmatics, interactants endeavour to be brief, relevant, sincere and clear in their contributions to the communicative event they are involved in, and their violations of one of the maxims is said to result from their overriding need to respect one or more of the others. In this paper I illustrate how violations of the quantity maxim “be brief” (i.e. highlighting and reiterating details of secondary importance) can be used by dishonest interactants as a face-saving device to mask their ignorance or ulterior motives. In four excerpts from fictional and non-fictional discourse (i.e. Shakespeare’s “King Lear”; Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress”; a car ad; a monograph on ethnography), I show how the stylistic devices of “insecure” addressers (e.g. litotes, climaxes, circumlocutions) serve to elicit sympathy or gain authority. Verbosity appears to be a sign of an addresser’s embarrassing or potentially dangerous lack of knowledge, which ultimately undermines the credibility it is supposed to enhance.