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外国语学院 语言学导论课程论文



论文题目：The Conversational Implicature’s Application in

Communication -------Advantages of Violating the CP

Class：English 112 Name： 张琴（Zhang Qin）

Number： 11021225



The Conversational Implicature’s Application in Communication


----------Advantages of Violating the CP

It is a truth universally acknowledged that there is a gap between what one literally says and what one contextually conveys. Conversational implicature is essentially a theory attempted at explaining how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant, from the level of expressed meaning to the level of implied meaning. In order to explain conversational implicature, H.Paul Grice, an American philosopher and linguist raised the famous “Cooperative Principle” (CP for abbreviation), that is, make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which you are engaged. He identified it into four maxims underlying the efficient cooperative use of language. It includes: Quantity; Quality; Relation and Manner. The cooperative principle plays a very important role in pragmatics. However, in our daily communication, you can find that speakers do not always obey the rules of the CP so closely. For some reason, the maxims are often violated. As far as I’m concerned, violating the CP has plenty of advantages.

Sometimes, people do violate the CP to make the conversational implicature humorous, polite, and attractive.

In our daily conversation, we often violate the maxim of quantity in order to describe things vividly or funnily. Here is the example. (A: How did it Jimmy does his history examination? B: Oh, not at all well, but there, it was not his faults. They asked him things that happened before the poor boy was born.) We can see that “not at all well” is as enough as required, the adding is needless. But it can convey the ridiculous implicature like “Jimmy’s failure caused by the teacher who asks the questions before Jimmy was born”. We can easily experience a sense of humor from speaker’s talking.

Violating the maxim of quality sometimes can avoid the unnecessary awkwardness. Here is the example. (A: Can I go up with you and have a cup of coffee? B: Oh, I’m afraid that my room is messy.) In this case, we can easily find that B’s answer seems to be an excuse and it may be not true. Actually, she is saying “Sorry, I don’t want you to go up with me”. Her deep implicature is refusal. But she didn’t


refuse directly for not losing A’s face. To some degree, the violation of quality maxim avoids both A and B’s embarrassment.

In advertisement field, we can see that advertisers often intentionally violate the maxim of quality by using figures of speech to make his product more attractive. “He was born in 1639, and he’s still flying with us today.” This is an advertising of wine. Obviously, it says something untrue, but it used personification to imply that “This wine was firstly produced in 1639, and it is still popular today”. Surely, consumers will be more interested in the original one.

Violation of relation maxim is rare, but in the social situation, it can keep politeness. To illustrate, I set the example blew: (In the dormitory, A says to B: “C is really a sting person. He is so mean.” B says “Good weather, isn’t it?”) It seems that B’s answer has nothing to do with A’s remark, but B thereby implies that A’s remark is impolite. B tries to transfer the topic by violating the maxim of relation and tells A he doesn’t want to discuss others.

Violating the maxim of manner sometimes will bring the convenience. There is an example. (A: Shall we get something for children. B: Yes. But I veto I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M.) In this case, we can see that children all like ice-cream, but the parents don’t allow them to eat too much of it. So when A and B are talking in front of the children, B tries to produce prolix remarks “I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M” to achieve implicature. It is very easy for A, as an adult to get the information that is “ice-cream”. On the contrary, it is a little bit difficult for a child to realize. So here, the violation of manner maxim brings the convenience for parents. “I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M” seems to be a code signal, and it avoids the children’ crying.

As a consequence, through the examples and analysis above, violation of the CP can reach many merits, such as humor, politeness, convenience and the like. But at the same time, we have to realize that only when the speakers and the hearers share the same psychological activities or cultures, or background knowledge can we violate the CP. Otherwise, it will lead to the failure of conversations. Learning about the CP and the violation of CP really benefits us to improve our abilities of communication.

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