Word.ws English Dictionary

cooperative principle

cooperative principle proper noun: the idea that listeners and speakers need to cooperate in order to communicate effectively.

Proper noun

the cooperative principle

  1. The idea that listeners and speakers need to cooperate in order to communicate effectively.
  2. A theory of how listeners and speakers cooperate to communicate with language.
    • Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts [...] One might label this the Cooperative Principle.1975, H. Paul Grice, “Logic and conversation”, in Peter Cole, Jerry Morgan, editors, Speech Acts, New York: Academic Press, →ISBN, page 45

Questions about cooperative principle

What does cooperative principle mean?
Cooperative principle means the idea that listeners and speakers need to cooperate in order to communicate effectively.
What part of speech is cooperative principle?
Cooperative principle is a proper noun.

Words near cooperative principle in the dictionary

  1. cooperations
  2. cooperative
  3. cooperative federalism
  4. cooperative game
  5. cooperative games
  6. cooperative principle
  7. cooperatively
  8. cooperativeness
  9. cooperatives
  10. cooperativism
  11. cooperativist

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cooperative principle (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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