Truthfulness, Conversational Maxims and Interaction in an Egyptian Village¹

A bstract This paper explores how far Grice's Maxim of Quality can account for patterns of truthfulnes in conversation in an Egyptian village. In the data, even where truthfulness seems unimportant, utterance design shows sensitivity to truthfulness constraints. The existence of a prohibition of lying within the code of honour can account for the patterns found, because of the nature of honour, which relates more to surface form than to underlying communicative intention. The Maxim is too simplistic, not in itself, but in functioning within a system which does not sufficiently distinguish between act and meaning, and which ignores some of the paradoxes of human interaction.