The Gricean Maxim of Quantity in Academic Texts: A Study of English and Persian Journal Articles Written by Both Native and Non-Native Speakers

This study aimed to investigate the role of culture as an extralinguistic factor on the observance or infringing of Grice’s quantity maxim when writing in first and second language. To achieve this aim, we selected and compared 30 psychological articles written by Iranians and native English writers. The corpora included 10 Persian articles written by Iranian authors, 10 English articles written by the same Iranian authors, and 10 English articles written by the native English authors. These articles were selected from among different psychology journals. All the sentences included in the discussion and result sections of the articles were then rated based on the observance/non-observance of Grice’s maxim of quantity. The data quantified as such were later subjected to an independent-samples t-test and the findings revealed that not only the native speakers of Persian but also their English counterparts violated the quantity maxim of Grice in their writings. To be specific, a statistically significant difference was observed between Persian articles written by Iranian writers and English articles written by native speakers of English language regarding the observance of quantity maxim. The frequency of this violation in Persian articles was more than that in native English articles. However, considering the English articles written by both English and Iranian authors, their difference did not reach statistical significance.