Cooperative Principles Essay

This paper mainly discusses about the cooperative principles in conversations of business. I pick up some conversations from our daily life as examples and the speakers all deliberately violates some maxims of politeness principle to produce some illocutionary meanings. From this, we can see that people often refuse others by deliberately violating the cooperative principles.(PC) Paul Grice was the first one to note this ubiquitous feature of language use and also the first to present a philosophical analysis. Grice begins to notice that conversations are usually to some degree cooperative enterprise. He then formulates the Cooperative Principles: “Make your conversational contribution such as is requited at the stage at which it occurs by

People’s conversation exchanges are cooperative efforts. The participants must cooperate in some degree in order to achieve their shared purpose and continue their talks. CP and its maxims will be followed by everybody.These maxims can be violated for various reasons, but only when they are flouted, to use Grice’s term, the conversional implications occur. When we flout a maxim, our language becomes indirect. Let’s see an example. Here is a dialogue in

These two people discuss about the price of bristles. Obviously, A thinks that the price is much higher than last year’s, his company is hard to accept it. As for B, he refuses A by a joke. In fact, he violated the rules of quantity in the principle of cooperation. The information in his words is too much for the listener to accept. However, this way to say can not break the conversation, instead, A can understand the implications and the real minds from B’s words. In business conversation， straight refusing will break the cooperation. Especially for businessmen, a successful cooperation is very important, not only for the present cooperation, but also for the continued cooperation. To recognize the implications of speakers has been an important ability for managers and