A: Has the boss arrived today?
B: The light's on in his office.
Notice that speaker A has asked a yes/no question. However, speaker B did not follow up with such a reply. The point here is that B has just violated one of the aforementioned Gricean maxims (relevance). But is B's response irrelevant?
The short answer is no. We do not take everything literally, so this response makes sense (of course, this assumes the boss doesn't leave the light on when out of office!) This is just one out of many cases of an indirect speech act. These such acts violate at least one of the maxims. Good listeners/speakers notice that the maxim is intentionally being violated, and can identify its intended meaning with the knowledge of the context of the situation.
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