Conversational logic

Robin Tolmach Lakoff
Table of contents

Conversational logic (CL) can be defined briefly as a system designed to relate the ‘illogical’ (apparently non-fully informative, repetitive, unclear, irrelevant or not fully truthful) utterances common in most forms of human discourse to their rational and informative equivalents, in order to permit the rigorous analysis of language. A cornerstone of pragmatics since its development in the late 1960s, it has been subject to a great deal of interpretation and analysis, and has been tested and extended by application to several cultures and discourse genres. It has been incorporated into many academic disciplines: not only ordinary language philosophy within which it originated, and linguistics, into which it was brought in the early 1970s, but also fields as various as literary theory, cognitive psychology and psychotherapy, law, anthropology, and conversation analysis.

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