Below are descriptions of four university professors. Hopefully you will never have an instructor like any of them because they are not very pragmatically savvy. Each one is failing to follow one of Grice’s maxims in particular. In your groups, tell which category of maxim is being violated for each professor1.

a. He’s so well spoken that you can get lulled into thinking that yo believe him. Then, after a while, you start to realize that most of what he’s saying is just unfounded opinion. He never backs up his statements with anything factual.

b. Her lectures are really hard to understand. I think that she knows what she’s talking about, but she uses all this complicated vocabulary, and she never defines any of the words. Plus, every sentence is a million words long, and by the time you figure out what it meant, she’s giving you another sentence that’s even more complicated!

c. His classes are hard to follow because he goes off so many tangents. We’ll be talking about Russian politics one minute, and then he’ll veer off to tell us something about democracy in Ancient Greece. Then he’ll get back to the Russian politics only to interrupt himself with a story about what his son did at breakfast this morning!

d. I feel as though she never gives us enough thorough answers to our questions. For example, I asked her yesterday why we shiver when we’re cold. All she said was “because you’re warm-blooded,” and then she went on with her lecture. I already knew that people are warm-blooded, but I don’t know what that has to do with shivering.