PRAGMATICS OF GENDERED INDIRECTNESS: APPLYING GRICE'S COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE TO CROSS-GENDER MISCOMMUNICATION

Abstract

The study draws on the Cooperative Principle (Cooper, 1981) to examine indirectness in discourse and its role in miscommunication across gender, a topic rarely covered in pragmatics research because it often lacks a connection to the examination of maxim flouting in actual miscommunication situations. The study's theoretical framework is grounded in an interpretivist philosophy and a qualitative paradigm, and combines theories from Grice (1975), including the four maxims of conversation; Rundquist (1992), including the gender-flouting model; and politeness theory (Brown and Levinson, 1987). For data collection, 200 undergraduate and graduate students from the Department of English Linguistics, University of the Punjab, Lahore, were purposively and stratified randomly sampled, with 40 students (20 male and 20 female) selected to form 20 mixed-gender dyads. Data collection included audio-recorded dyadic conversations and answers to Discourse Completion Tasks, which were analyzed deductively using discourse-analytic coding. Results show that the former (quantity and relation maxims) were flouted mainly through withholding by men and through topic-shifting by women; the latter (manner and quality maxims) were flouted mainly through hedging by men and through mitigation by women, leading to two distinct mechanisms of miscommunication: under-recovery of implicature and under-detection of illocutionary force. The results point to gendered indirectness as a systematic, socially patterned pragmatic resource rather than incidental variation.