People deploying Gricean maxims don't necessarily regard them as prescriptive, although sometimes listeners may get angry at speakers who violate them. For exam

People deploying Gricean maxims don't necessarily regard them as prescriptive, although sometimes listeners may get angry at speakers who violate them. For example, Wikipedia quotes Kent Bach as saying that these maxims > are not sociological generalizations about speech, nor they are moral prescriptions or proscriptions on what to say or communicate. Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit. Wikipedia says Grice also "found it interesting when [the maxims] were not respected, namely either "flouted" (with the listener being expected to be able to understand the message) or "violated" (with the listener being expected to not note this)" -- the former including the case of sarcasm.