Someone can violate the Gricean maxims to avoid an uncomfortable conversation at Thanksgiving dinner.

Guest A may mention their support for an unpopular candidate in the next election.

Guest B will try to steer the conversation away from politics by refusing to provide information about who they intend to vote for, intentionally flouting the Maxim of Quantity. By not supplying this information, the message is sent that Guest B does not want to talk about the election.

Another way is to change the subject, asking who cooked a certain dish and complimenting them on it, violating the Relevance maxim. This signals that Guest B would rather talk about something else.

In these ways, Guest B shows that they are unwilling to ‘cooperate’ in further conversation on the topic, because the expected responses are intentionally withheld.

Simple antonyms             dead / alive

a) The goldfish is dead.

b) The goldfish is alive.

Because these two sentences are contradictory (one must be true, and the other false), dead and alive are simple antonyms. Something cannot be both dead and alive, or in an intermediate state.

 

Gradable antonyms        boring / interesting

(a) This movie is boring.

(b) This movie is interesting.

(c) This movie is neither boring nor interesting.

(a) and (b) can’t both be true, but they can both be false, so they are contrary. This means that boring and interesting are gradable antonyms

 

Reverses             create / destroy

One of these actions undoes the other.

 

Converses           teacher / student

(a) Dionna is Mark’s teacher.

(b) Mark is Dionna’s student.

If you replace teacher with student (or vice versa), and switch the order of the two names, you get a sentence with the same propositional meaning.

 

Taxonomic sisters           cherry / apple

A cherry is a kind of fruit, and so is an apple. They are both hyponyms of fruit.