The purpose of this study is to examine the language of literary texts based on the pragmatic theories; Cooperative Principle and Grice's maxims. The researcher collected data from a science fiction novel, The Giver by Los Lowry. The findings reveal that most of the time, Lowry made the characters disobey Grice's maxims and the Cooperative Principle. Observance of the maxims was less than failure to observe the maxims. Lowry had her characters fail to observe the maxims for specific purposes such as generating new implicatures, hiding the truth for a period, or persuading and convincing the readers about a message Lowry wanted to convey.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the rule breaking of Gricean conversational Maxims and how it is used in the TV series The Office. The character Dwight has been in focus, and the main goal of this study is to find out if and how he violates the Gricean Maxims in conversations. The study is based on written transcripts from four episodes of this TV series. The character Dwight's conversations from these episodes have been analyzed in order to see how one or more of the four conversational maxims (quantity, quality, manner and relation) were dealt with. The maxim that Dwight turned out to break the most was the maxim of relation. Dwight is a character that contributes to this series by repeatedly breaking the conversational maxims. / Syftet med denna studie är att analysera överträdelser av Grices samtalsmaximer och hur de används in tv-serien The Office. Karaktären Dwight är i fokus och målet med studien är att ta reda på om och hur han bryter mot Grices samtalsmaximer. Studien baseras på fyra transkriberade avsnitt från denna tv-serie. Dwights konversationer i dessa fyra olika avsnitt har analyserats för att se hur en eller flera av konversationsmaximerna (kvantitet, kvalitet, uppförande och relation) har behandlats. Den maxim som Dwight visade sig bryta mot mest var relationsmaximen. Dwight är en karaktär som bidrar till denna humorserie genom att frekvent bryta mot samtalsmaximerna.

A self-educated shepherd, Scottish writer James Hogg (1770-1835) spoke from a position outside the dominant discourse, depicting issues of his age related to gender, class, and ethnicity by giving voice to people from the margins and, thus (either consciously or unconsciously), revealing gender politics and Britain's imperial aims. Hogg’s contemporary critics received his work rather negatively, viewing his subjects such as prostitution, out-of-wedlock-pregnancy, infanticide, and the violence of war as violating the principles of literary politeness. Hogg’s obstinacy in addressing these issues, however, supports the thesis that his aim was far more significant than challenging the expectations of his contemporary readers. This project shows that pragmatics can be applied productively to literature because its eclecticism offers the possibility of developing a detailed discussion about three aspects of literary communication—the author, the reader and the text—without prioritising any of them. Literature is an instance of language in use (the field of pragmatics) where an author creates the texts and a reader recreates the author’s message through the text. Analysis of Hogg’s flouting of Grice’s maxims for communication strategies and of his defying the principles of politeness enables a theoretically supported discussion about Hogg’s possible intentions, as well as about how his intentions were perceived by the literary establishment of his time; while both relevance theory and Bakhtin’s socio-linguistics enriched by a historically contextualised politeness shed new light on the negative reception of Hogg’s texts.