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【中圖分类号】G623.31 【文献标识码】B 【文章编号】1001-4128(2010)06-0014-04
1. Introduction
Cooperative Principle (CP) was first proposed by the U.S. linguist and philosopher Grice in the late 1960s. H.P. Grice lectures “Logic and Conversation” concept. “Logic and Conversation” points out that our conversation is subject to certain restricted conditions. Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least. cooperative efforts, and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes. or at least a mutually accepted direction. This purpose or direction may be fixed from the start (e.g.. by an initial proposal of a question for discussion). or it may evolve during the exchange; it may be fairly definite. or it may be so indefinite as to leave very considerable latitude to the participants (as in a casual conversation). But at each stage, some possible conversational moves would be excluded as conversationally unsuitable. We might then formulate a rough general principle which participants will be expected (ceteris paribus) to observe, namely: Make 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. One might label this as the Cooperative Principle (CP) (Grice,1975).
2. Main Concepts in CP and Discourse Analysis
2.1 CP and Four Maxims of CP
Grice believes that in all language communication activities, in order to achieve specific goals, there is a tacit understanding between the speakers, which is the principle of cooperation session. Specifically, the principles of cooperation requireeach participant meet their goal or direction. Such cooperation is the rapper that they can continue to make meaningful verbal communication. There are four maxims of CP.
A. The maxim of quality
----Do not say what you believe to be false.
----Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
B. The maxim of quantity
----Make your contribution as informative as required for the current purpose of the exchange.
----Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
C. The maxim of relation
----Be relevant ( make your contribution relevant).
D.The maxim of manner
----Avoid obscurity of expression.
----Avoid ambiguity. ----Be brief. ----Be orderly.
2.2 Discourse Analysis
Discourse Analysis has become an important branch of linguistics. The formation of many schools, the rich theory and research methods are gradually introduced. “Imagine a world without text equivalent to imagine a world without language, it is unthinkable to imagine.”
To understand the discourse analysis, we must figure out a concept, that is what is discourse. Discourse is the actual use of language units, and it is a continuous process of communication, then a series of paragraphs or sentences constitute the language as a whole. It can be a dialogueor monologues, which include written language,and spoken language. One of the basic elements of discourse analysis is consistent. The factors that affect the discourse include elements within the language and external non-linguistic elements beyond text.
discourse analysis takes discourse as the basic unit, then carries out microcosmic points (including vocabulary, grammar, etc.) and macrocosmic points (including characterization, plot, central idea, writing skills, etc.) based on the basic content of discourse.
People start from Understanding the meaning of the whole passage, analyse the relation between sentences and sections, then find the main ideas and important information section, and take a number of long sentences and difficult sentences under certain language environment for syntax analysis and training, which is the ability of discourse analysis .
3. Using CP in the Process of Discourse Analysis
3.1 Relation between CP and Discourse Analysis
Cooperative Principle originated from people's language communication, it is a series of principles participants must comply with in order to achieve the communicative purposes. This shows that its starting point is not for discourse analysis. Although Grice proposed Cooperative Principle from the angle of study and analyze the basic characteristics of everyday language, but it is not just for everyday language communication, but applies to all forms of verbal communication.
For the linguistic factors, functional linguists, Halliday has done a thorough and systematic analysis. However, there is a language phenomenon that the surface meaning of the conversation is out of touch with the conversational implicature, and functional linguistics can not make a convincing explanation for this.
3.2 Violation of Four Maxims
In real communication, however, speakers do not always observe these maxims strictly. These maxims can be violated for various reasons. When any of the maxims is blantantly violated, i.e. both the speaker and the hearer are aware of the violation, our language becomes indirect, then conversational implicature arises.
A. Violation of Maxim of quality
Let's look at the examples below and make analysis of them.
----A: Would you like to go movie with me tonight?
----B: The final exam is approaching. I'm afraid I have to prepare for it.
----A: would you like to come to our party tonight?
----B: I'm afraid I'm not feeling so well tonight.
----A: Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
----B: That was no lady, that was my wife.
In the first two examples, B is not willing to accept A's suggestion, so B give his answer indirectly. It seems that B doesn't provide enough evidence to refuse A' s invitation. In the third example, A saw the lady with B last night, and we can deduce that A knew B's wife and the lady with B was not B's wife. B said that was no lady and he even cannot convince himself. That means B didn't want anyone to know the fact and he didn't want A to continue the conversation .So we can learn from the three examples that B violates maxim of quality: the speaker say something that he doesn't believe by himself and he say something that is short of evidence on purpose.
B. Violation of maxim of quantity
At a party a young man introduces himself by saying “I'm Robert Sampson from Leeds, 28, unmarried…”
----A:When is Susan's farewell party?
----B:Sometime next month.
In the first example, we could see that the young man doesn't provide enough information as required. And he just tells his name, where he comes from, his age and his marriage situation. He wants to tell others those are all he can tell and he doesn't want others to ask more about himself. In the second example, we may make such a guess that B would not like to tell the exact time of the party or B doesn't know the time of the party, what he can tell is just the vague time. All the two examples violate the maxim of quantity intentionally or unconsciously. However, people can learn intention of speaker according to the context, the ability of cognition, and their common knowledge of culture.
C. Violation of maxim of relation
----A: How did the math exam go today, Jonnie?
----B: We had a basketball match with class 2 and we beat them.
----A: The hostess is an awful bore.
----B: The roses in the garden are beautiful, aren't they?
----A: What time is it?
----B: The postman has just arrived.
In above examples, it seems that answers answered by Bs are not related to the questions asked or put forward by As. Maybe Bs would like not to talk the subject, or Bs think that there is no need to talk about the subject. Sometimes because of the common knowledge owned by both sides of participants, people involved in conversation know how to understand the implied meaning. In daily communication, one side should be good at having a penetrating insight of the other side's intention of exchanging topics.
4. Disadvantages and Challenges of CP
4.1 Disadvantages of CP
In an outline of newly organized pracmatics, written by He Zhaoxiong, a chinese linguist, it lists limits of cooperative principle as following:
First, during the verbal communication, whether Cooperative Principle is the highest principle of communication. How about the four maxims? How about the relationships of the four maxims.
Second, Cooperative Principle just explains conversational implicature produced by human's using languages indirectly. However, it doesn't explain that why in daily life, people often say something indirectly to make other people deduce the conversational implicature instead of using the direct way to communicate with each other. That also means Cooperative Principle shows us the relationship between surface meaning and true meaning of utterances, but it doesn't tell us why people often disobey Cooperative Principle, use implied and indirect way to express their thinkings to communicate.
Third,Grice's Conversational Implicature theory pays more attention to special conversational meaning, excluding common conversational meaning, which limits the power of its explanation.(何兆熊,2000)
4.2 Three Major Challenges against Cooperative Principle
Cooperative Principle has profound impact on the later study of pragmatics. Even now, it is sill a rather influential pragmatic principle. However, because of its shortcomings by itself, it is updated and replenished by many scholars. Some linguists and philosophers also offer some criticisms of Grice's four maxims, which to them only depict an ideal picture to become a perfectly rational conversationalist and which seems to have interpreted the nature of conversation far more from a social moral code
point of view. Three of the most influential pragmatic principles are: Leech's Politeness Principle (PP), Sperber and Wilson's Principle of Conversational Relevance, and a Chinese scholar, Qian Guanlian's Goal-Intention Principle.
4.2.1Leech's Politeness Principle (PP)
The following conversation script between a little girl and her parent:
----A: Why have not seen grandpa for such long time?
----B: Dear,he is going to heaven,bringing back gifts from there.
The parent certainly has to tell the truth that the little girl's grandfather has passed away,which will surely hurt the girl deeply.The CP does not work in this conversation,neither in the positive CP part, nor the part of the conversational implicature,since the little girl barely has the knowledge to implicate the connotation of the line said by her parent.
For the purpose of accounting for phenomena like this,other linguists and philosophers bring forth another principle---the PP (Lakoff,1973,cited in Cook,1994,p43).This principle suggests the three maxims as follows:
--Don't impose--Give options
--Make your receiver feel good
Leech (1983,cited in Cele-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000, p26) puts forward a cost-benefit scale, meaning when the speaker is impolite, there will be a higher cost on the part of the hearer, and vice versa. Brown and Levinson(1978, cited in Cele-Murcia&Olshtain, 2000,P26) subdivide politeness into negative politeness and positive politeness,with the former signifying avoidance of imposition and the latter initiation of imposition. It seems that the PP describes why,despite the maxims of quality and quantity,people sometimes appropriately say things that are false or less informative than is required.
4.2.2 Sperber and Wilson's Principle of Conversational Relevance
In 1986, Sperber and Wilson put forward query to cooperative principle and brought forward Principle of Relevance. They thought that words said by every participant have to be related to the major topic or words said by the other participants. It is the relevance between one word and anther that makes the two sentence a coherent and meaningful integral whole. There isn't any cooperative principle in communication and violation of the maxims doesn't exist. Communicative activity is a kind of cognitive activity. The base of cognition is the relevance of utterances used in daily communication. In the process of cognizing objects, people always follow Principle of Relevance. According to Principle of Relevance, every utterance is related to another. The process of understanding the utterances is the process of looking for relevance. When and only when the speaker provides the optimal relevance, the listener can have a correct understanding of utterances. Sperber and Wilson thought that the speaker didn't mean to violate any maxim to make the listener understand what they said. That is to say, the relevance between words said by speaker and context make people make reasonable deduction about the speaker's intention and thereby react rightly.
5. Situation of Study of CP in China
As a major branch of pragmatics, Cooperative Principle has been focus of some scholars in linguistics. Due to its shortcomings , it is also questioned by many scholars. When many foreign scholars pay their attention to its shortcomings and change their direction of study, most of the Chinese scholars just change their study sight into empirical research of Cooperative Principle. According to the papers on Cooperative Principle we collected from CNKI ( Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure) published in 2010, we can find that Cooperative Principle is mainly used in following aspects:
First, Cooperative Principle is used in literary translation, translation of business English. That means people must understand during cross-cultural communication how to translate some special words used in the literary works and the business English.
Second, scholars use Cooperative Principle to analyse characteristics of humourous utterances and female language so that they can analyse artistic effect of those words.
Third, many scholars analyse words used in TV dramas, comic sketches, movies, service languages, and sales promotions. Then, they explain the special effect produced by violation of Cooperative Principle.
Only less than ten of the forty-five papers published in CNKI in 2010 are about the theory of Cooperative Principle and are purely theoretical. Therefore, we can make such a conclusion that at least in 2010, Chinese scholars pay more attention to the contextual application of Cooperative Principle. More and more scholars would rather focus on pragmatic analysis of violation of Cooperative Principle.
6. Conclusion
Since Grice put forward Cooperative Principle, many scholars have made study on it. Different people can get different research results. Some think poorly of it. Some bring forward their question about it and advocate to amend and make up it. Anyhow, cooperative Principle is the base of human language communication. Because of different languages, people use and understand Cooperative Principle differently. Using it as a base to analyse conversational implicature, people can make human languages more abundant and encourage communication between each other. References
[1] Grice. P,1975,logic and conversation in P. cole and J. Morgan
[2] Cele-Murcia,M.C.&Olshtain,E.(2000).Discourse and Context in Language Teaching:
[3] Leech,G.N.(1981).Semantics(2nd edn.).Harmondsworth:Penguin.
[4] 錢冠连. 汉语文化语用学[M].北京:清华大学出版社,2002
[5] 何兆雄.新编语用学概要[M].上海:上海外语教育出版社,2000
1. Introduction
Cooperative Principle (CP) was first proposed by the U.S. linguist and philosopher Grice in the late 1960s. H.P. Grice lectures “Logic and Conversation” concept. “Logic and Conversation” points out that our conversation is subject to certain restricted conditions. Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least. cooperative efforts, and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes. or at least a mutually accepted direction. This purpose or direction may be fixed from the start (e.g.. by an initial proposal of a question for discussion). or it may evolve during the exchange; it may be fairly definite. or it may be so indefinite as to leave very considerable latitude to the participants (as in a casual conversation). But at each stage, some possible conversational moves would be excluded as conversationally unsuitable. We might then formulate a rough general principle which participants will be expected (ceteris paribus) to observe, namely: Make 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. One might label this as the Cooperative Principle (CP) (Grice,1975).
2. Main Concepts in CP and Discourse Analysis
2.1 CP and Four Maxims of CP
Grice believes that in all language communication activities, in order to achieve specific goals, there is a tacit understanding between the speakers, which is the principle of cooperation session. Specifically, the principles of cooperation requireeach participant meet their goal or direction. Such cooperation is the rapper that they can continue to make meaningful verbal communication. There are four maxims of CP.
A. The maxim of quality
----Do not say what you believe to be false.
----Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
B. The maxim of quantity
----Make your contribution as informative as required for the current purpose of the exchange.
----Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
C. The maxim of relation
----Be relevant ( make your contribution relevant).
D.The maxim of manner
----Avoid obscurity of expression.
----Avoid ambiguity. ----Be brief. ----Be orderly.
2.2 Discourse Analysis
Discourse Analysis has become an important branch of linguistics. The formation of many schools, the rich theory and research methods are gradually introduced. “Imagine a world without text equivalent to imagine a world without language, it is unthinkable to imagine.”
To understand the discourse analysis, we must figure out a concept, that is what is discourse. Discourse is the actual use of language units, and it is a continuous process of communication, then a series of paragraphs or sentences constitute the language as a whole. It can be a dialogueor monologues, which include written language,and spoken language. One of the basic elements of discourse analysis is consistent. The factors that affect the discourse include elements within the language and external non-linguistic elements beyond text.
discourse analysis takes discourse as the basic unit, then carries out microcosmic points (including vocabulary, grammar, etc.) and macrocosmic points (including characterization, plot, central idea, writing skills, etc.) based on the basic content of discourse.
People start from Understanding the meaning of the whole passage, analyse the relation between sentences and sections, then find the main ideas and important information section, and take a number of long sentences and difficult sentences under certain language environment for syntax analysis and training, which is the ability of discourse analysis .
3. Using CP in the Process of Discourse Analysis
3.1 Relation between CP and Discourse Analysis
Cooperative Principle originated from people's language communication, it is a series of principles participants must comply with in order to achieve the communicative purposes. This shows that its starting point is not for discourse analysis. Although Grice proposed Cooperative Principle from the angle of study and analyze the basic characteristics of everyday language, but it is not just for everyday language communication, but applies to all forms of verbal communication.
For the linguistic factors, functional linguists, Halliday has done a thorough and systematic analysis. However, there is a language phenomenon that the surface meaning of the conversation is out of touch with the conversational implicature, and functional linguistics can not make a convincing explanation for this.
3.2 Violation of Four Maxims
In real communication, however, speakers do not always observe these maxims strictly. These maxims can be violated for various reasons. When any of the maxims is blantantly violated, i.e. both the speaker and the hearer are aware of the violation, our language becomes indirect, then conversational implicature arises.
A. Violation of Maxim of quality
Let's look at the examples below and make analysis of them.
----A: Would you like to go movie with me tonight?
----B: The final exam is approaching. I'm afraid I have to prepare for it.
----A: would you like to come to our party tonight?
----B: I'm afraid I'm not feeling so well tonight.
----A: Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
----B: That was no lady, that was my wife.
In the first two examples, B is not willing to accept A's suggestion, so B give his answer indirectly. It seems that B doesn't provide enough evidence to refuse A' s invitation. In the third example, A saw the lady with B last night, and we can deduce that A knew B's wife and the lady with B was not B's wife. B said that was no lady and he even cannot convince himself. That means B didn't want anyone to know the fact and he didn't want A to continue the conversation .So we can learn from the three examples that B violates maxim of quality: the speaker say something that he doesn't believe by himself and he say something that is short of evidence on purpose.
B. Violation of maxim of quantity
At a party a young man introduces himself by saying “I'm Robert Sampson from Leeds, 28, unmarried…”
----A:When is Susan's farewell party?
----B:Sometime next month.
In the first example, we could see that the young man doesn't provide enough information as required. And he just tells his name, where he comes from, his age and his marriage situation. He wants to tell others those are all he can tell and he doesn't want others to ask more about himself. In the second example, we may make such a guess that B would not like to tell the exact time of the party or B doesn't know the time of the party, what he can tell is just the vague time. All the two examples violate the maxim of quantity intentionally or unconsciously. However, people can learn intention of speaker according to the context, the ability of cognition, and their common knowledge of culture.
C. Violation of maxim of relation
----A: How did the math exam go today, Jonnie?
----B: We had a basketball match with class 2 and we beat them.
----A: The hostess is an awful bore.
----B: The roses in the garden are beautiful, aren't they?
----A: What time is it?
----B: The postman has just arrived.
In above examples, it seems that answers answered by Bs are not related to the questions asked or put forward by As. Maybe Bs would like not to talk the subject, or Bs think that there is no need to talk about the subject. Sometimes because of the common knowledge owned by both sides of participants, people involved in conversation know how to understand the implied meaning. In daily communication, one side should be good at having a penetrating insight of the other side's intention of exchanging topics.
4. Disadvantages and Challenges of CP
4.1 Disadvantages of CP
In an outline of newly organized pracmatics, written by He Zhaoxiong, a chinese linguist, it lists limits of cooperative principle as following:
First, during the verbal communication, whether Cooperative Principle is the highest principle of communication. How about the four maxims? How about the relationships of the four maxims.
Second, Cooperative Principle just explains conversational implicature produced by human's using languages indirectly. However, it doesn't explain that why in daily life, people often say something indirectly to make other people deduce the conversational implicature instead of using the direct way to communicate with each other. That also means Cooperative Principle shows us the relationship between surface meaning and true meaning of utterances, but it doesn't tell us why people often disobey Cooperative Principle, use implied and indirect way to express their thinkings to communicate.
Third,Grice's Conversational Implicature theory pays more attention to special conversational meaning, excluding common conversational meaning, which limits the power of its explanation.(何兆熊,2000)
4.2 Three Major Challenges against Cooperative Principle
Cooperative Principle has profound impact on the later study of pragmatics. Even now, it is sill a rather influential pragmatic principle. However, because of its shortcomings by itself, it is updated and replenished by many scholars. Some linguists and philosophers also offer some criticisms of Grice's four maxims, which to them only depict an ideal picture to become a perfectly rational conversationalist and which seems to have interpreted the nature of conversation far more from a social moral code
point of view. Three of the most influential pragmatic principles are: Leech's Politeness Principle (PP), Sperber and Wilson's Principle of Conversational Relevance, and a Chinese scholar, Qian Guanlian's Goal-Intention Principle.
4.2.1Leech's Politeness Principle (PP)
The following conversation script between a little girl and her parent:
----A: Why have not seen grandpa for such long time?
----B: Dear,he is going to heaven,bringing back gifts from there.
The parent certainly has to tell the truth that the little girl's grandfather has passed away,which will surely hurt the girl deeply.The CP does not work in this conversation,neither in the positive CP part, nor the part of the conversational implicature,since the little girl barely has the knowledge to implicate the connotation of the line said by her parent.
For the purpose of accounting for phenomena like this,other linguists and philosophers bring forth another principle---the PP (Lakoff,1973,cited in Cook,1994,p43).This principle suggests the three maxims as follows:
--Don't impose--Give options
--Make your receiver feel good
Leech (1983,cited in Cele-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000, p26) puts forward a cost-benefit scale, meaning when the speaker is impolite, there will be a higher cost on the part of the hearer, and vice versa. Brown and Levinson(1978, cited in Cele-Murcia&Olshtain, 2000,P26) subdivide politeness into negative politeness and positive politeness,with the former signifying avoidance of imposition and the latter initiation of imposition. It seems that the PP describes why,despite the maxims of quality and quantity,people sometimes appropriately say things that are false or less informative than is required.
4.2.2 Sperber and Wilson's Principle of Conversational Relevance
In 1986, Sperber and Wilson put forward query to cooperative principle and brought forward Principle of Relevance. They thought that words said by every participant have to be related to the major topic or words said by the other participants. It is the relevance between one word and anther that makes the two sentence a coherent and meaningful integral whole. There isn't any cooperative principle in communication and violation of the maxims doesn't exist. Communicative activity is a kind of cognitive activity. The base of cognition is the relevance of utterances used in daily communication. In the process of cognizing objects, people always follow Principle of Relevance. According to Principle of Relevance, every utterance is related to another. The process of understanding the utterances is the process of looking for relevance. When and only when the speaker provides the optimal relevance, the listener can have a correct understanding of utterances. Sperber and Wilson thought that the speaker didn't mean to violate any maxim to make the listener understand what they said. That is to say, the relevance between words said by speaker and context make people make reasonable deduction about the speaker's intention and thereby react rightly.
5. Situation of Study of CP in China
As a major branch of pragmatics, Cooperative Principle has been focus of some scholars in linguistics. Due to its shortcomings , it is also questioned by many scholars. When many foreign scholars pay their attention to its shortcomings and change their direction of study, most of the Chinese scholars just change their study sight into empirical research of Cooperative Principle. According to the papers on Cooperative Principle we collected from CNKI ( Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure) published in 2010, we can find that Cooperative Principle is mainly used in following aspects:
First, Cooperative Principle is used in literary translation, translation of business English. That means people must understand during cross-cultural communication how to translate some special words used in the literary works and the business English.
Second, scholars use Cooperative Principle to analyse characteristics of humourous utterances and female language so that they can analyse artistic effect of those words.
Third, many scholars analyse words used in TV dramas, comic sketches, movies, service languages, and sales promotions. Then, they explain the special effect produced by violation of Cooperative Principle.
Only less than ten of the forty-five papers published in CNKI in 2010 are about the theory of Cooperative Principle and are purely theoretical. Therefore, we can make such a conclusion that at least in 2010, Chinese scholars pay more attention to the contextual application of Cooperative Principle. More and more scholars would rather focus on pragmatic analysis of violation of Cooperative Principle.
6. Conclusion
Since Grice put forward Cooperative Principle, many scholars have made study on it. Different people can get different research results. Some think poorly of it. Some bring forward their question about it and advocate to amend and make up it. Anyhow, cooperative Principle is the base of human language communication. Because of different languages, people use and understand Cooperative Principle differently. Using it as a base to analyse conversational implicature, people can make human languages more abundant and encourage communication between each other. References
[1] Grice. P,1975,logic and conversation in P. cole and J. Morgan
[2] Cele-Murcia,M.C.&Olshtain,E.(2000).Discourse and Context in Language Teaching:
[3] Leech,G.N.(1981).Semantics(2nd edn.).Harmondsworth:Penguin.
[4] 錢冠连. 汉语文化语用学[M].北京:清华大学出版社,2002
[5] 何兆雄.新编语用学概要[M].上海:上海外语教育出版社,2000