Universality of Grice’s Maxims in Najdi Arabic Dialect

Abstract

This study was conducted to test the universality of the Cooperative principle and the conversational maxims within the non-standard Arabic, Najdi dialect. In order to determine the applicability of the maxims, we used Prince‟s (1982) description of what a language has to look like if it lacked one maxim. For this study, I applied the examples of Prince to the Najdi Arabic, and asked 10 speakers of the Najdi dialect, what the utterance inferred. Later, I provided examples from the speech exchange between the participants. In this paper, I only discussed the Quality and the Quantity maxims. The results of the study showed that the speakers of the Najdi dialect do not observe the maxims when they want to generate an implicature. Finally, the results of the study argue in favor of Conversational maxim and the Cooperative principle.