Abstract: There are some conversational principles necessary for a successful conversation. One is the Cooperative Principle of four maxims. Violating any one of the four maxims will give rise to conversational implicatures; the other is the Politeness Principle, proposed to rescue the Cooperative Principle.
To draw pragmatic implications from the violation of the Cooperative Principle is of no difference between the west and the east. What are different lies in people’s choice of the maxims of the Cooperative Principle and this is due to different cultural background. Chinese-styled politeness is characterized by four aspects: respectfulness, modesty, attitudinal warmth and refinement.
Language, as a special form of communication, may be viewed as a system, as a vehicle for cultural transmission. It does not exist apart from culture. Thus, language and cultural are interactive and understanding of one requires understanding of the other. To better achieve the communicative goal, it is necessary to choose the appreciate way of expression under certain circumstances and cultural factors plays an important role in using language effectively.
Key words: cultural difference; conversational principles ; Cooperative Principle ; Politeness Principle
Few areas of people’s experience are closer to them or more continuously with them than their language—they have to communicate by speaking, listening, reading and writing in everyday life. In the course of communication, it is no doubt that speech enjoys priority not only because it precedes writing in terms of evolution, but a large amount of communication is carried out in conversation as well. An ideal conversation is usually assumed to be carried out by “turn-taking” and thus the meanings of the utterance are expressed accordingly. However, the real intentions of the speakers cannot always be drawn by simply interpreting the surface meanings of the words in the utterance, for people often tend to mean more in a roundabout way than what they actually say. Let’s first look at an example which took place on the campus at noon:
Devin: What time is it?
Jakie: The students are going to the dining hall.
Here, Jakie’s answer doesn’t seem to make sense on the face of it, but it is still an adequate answer for Devin, because the particular contexts of this conversation include the fact that the students usually have lunch at about 11:30 in the university and Devin is aware of this. It is possible for Devin to work out the time by interpreting or guessing what Jakie says and the more she knows about the context, the more qualified her guesswork is going to be.
Normally in conversational interaction, people work on the assumption that a certain set of rules is in operation, unless they receive indications to the contrary. For example, if Jakie gives the same answer to a stranger, it’ll likely lead to communication breakdown because nobody expects a successful conversation in which people try to confuse, trick, or withhold relevant information from each other. In other words, a successful conversation should be the fruit of all the participants’ efforts and collaboration is a necessary factor for them to achieve a certain goal. Therefore, people are expected to be cooperate during a conversation, and such cooperative mechanisms have very little to do with logic and semantics, but are grounded in some pragmatic principles, especially the Cooperative Principle.