英语专业-OnCooperativePrincipleandPragmaticFailure.pdf

1 Language is the most important tool for humans to communicate. Speech communication came into being with the starting of human society due to the needs of humansurviving and developing. At the same time, speech communication plays a very important role in the maintaining and developing of human society. With the development of society and advancement of science and technology, speech communication will play a more and more important role in the course of human communication.Communication by language is our basic ability for living as well as social activity. In this thesis, I clarify my point of view based on cooperative principle, From the speech communication of daily life,I link these communication phenomena of oral or written language to the theories of linguists such as Grice and Leech and their relative theories. I discuss the application of these theories to the speech communication of daily life. Cooperative Principle Theory proposed by Grice is a very important theory in pragmatics. It has a powerful explanatory power on the speech communication. The CP can be widely used. It can explain various pragmatics phenomena in language understanding. From the CP perspective, I discuss the speech communication and its application in real speech communication. First, this thesis elaborates the main points of the theory: definition of the CP and its maxims. Then the thesis deals with the application of CP in speech communication from two aspects: successful speech communication and pragmatic failure. Then it deals with the principles we must follow in successful communication and the violation of polite principle and tact principles that causes pragmatics failure. A further study of the nature and cause of pragmatic failure will make us more aware of the importance of sensitivity to cross-culture pragmatics difference and urgency of developing pragmatic competence. Thus this thesis can help us avoid the pragmatic failure and communicate successfully. 1 Cooperative Principle Cooperative Principle Theory proposed by Grice is a very important theory in Pragmatics. It has a powerful explanatory power on the speech communication. The CP can be widely used. It can explain various pragmatics phenomena in language understanding. Obviously, language users must share certain rules and conventions which enable them to understand one another in the many instances where the meaning and the intent, i.e. the illocutionary force of utterances are not explicitly stated. In his text Logic and conversation Grice suggests four conversational maxims and the Cooperative Principle (CP) to explain the mechanisms through which people interpret implicature. 1.1 Cooperative Principle And Its Maxims Pragmatics is concerned with non-natural meaning,especially implicature. According to Grice,meaning can be natrual or non-natural. People can understand the natrual meaning by the literal meaning.Unlike the natural meaning,getting the non-natrual 2 meaning needs people to calculate the real meaning by the literal meaning.A sentence may be conventionally used to mean something . Grice proposed that speakers frequently and blatantly fail to observe any of above conversational maxims to prompt the hearer to look for a meaning which is different from, or in addition to, the expressed meaning. However, a second language learner, even if s/he is quite fluent in English, may not necessarily arrive at the same conclusion. This conventional meaning is aiso what we may call the literal meaning or linguistic meaning of the sentence.However,the sentence may be used to convey some special meaning which we term implicature. It is the type of meaning that deviates from the conventional or linguistic meaning of an utterance. Securing the intention of the speaker behind the use of a sentence is of great importance. People talk with the intention of communicating something to someone else, this is the basis of all linguistic behavior. Grice noticed that in daily conversation people do not usually say things directly but tend to imply them. In our daily conversation, we seem to follow some principles like the followingMake your conversational contribution such as is required;at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.And this principle is known as the cooperative priciple or CP for short. To specify the CP futher,Grice introduced four categories of maxims as follows. Quantity: 1.Make your contribution as informative as is reqired(for the current purposed of the exchange.) 2.Do not make your contribution more informative than is required . Quality:Try to make your contribution one that is true. 1.Do not say what you believe to be false. 2.Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Relation: Be relavant. Manner: Be perspicuous. 1.Avoid obscurity of expression. 2.Avoid ambiguity 3.Be brief(avoid prolixity) 4.Be orderly. 3 The use of term such as principleand maxim does not mean 。