A Note on Pragmatic Principles of Least Effort*

Larry Horn has long argued for the reduction of the Gricean maxims of conversation to two, one that turns on saving the hearer’s processing effort (the Q-Principle), the other oriented to reducing the speaker’s effort (the RPrinciple). I question the status of the latter as a communicative principle and, although it is presented as part of a neo-Gricean account, I suggest that it marks a clear departure from Grice’s concerns. 1 A neo-Gricean framework In his latest work, Larry Horn (2005) reiterates the position he has maintained since his important and influential 1984 paper, according to which, apart from the Quality (truthfulness) maxims, which he considers essential and unreducible (Horn 1984: 12; 2004: 13), the Gricean maxims should be reduced to two general principles. These are the Q-Principle and the R-Principle, the first of which is oriented to the interests of the hearer and the second to the interests of the speaker. He invokes a number of forerunners to this position, including in particular Zipf (1949) and Martinet (1962). In developing an ecological account of human behaviour quite generally, Zipf emphasised the fundamental role played by a Principle of Least Effort: ‘the primary principle that governs our entire individual and collective behaviour of all sorts, including the behaviour of our language ...’ (Zipf 1949: vii). In the realm of linguistic behaviour, he distinguished the opposing pressures exerted by the speaker’s and the hearer’s economies of effort, the one oriented toward minimal linguistic articulation, the other toward maximal explicitness. Martinet (1962) described a primary mechanism of language change as coming from the interaction of two factors: ‘first, the requirements of communication, the need for the speaker to convey his message, and second, the * This short piece is part of a longer paper entitled ‘Relevance theory, Grice and the neoGriceans’, to appear in Intercultural Pragmatics, in which I respond to Horn (2005) on the different goals and orientations of the three approaches. I’m grateful to Tim Wharton, Deirdre Wilson and Vladimir Žegarac for interesting discussion of the issues.