Cooperative Principles Violation In Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet

Cooperative Principles Violation

In Romeo and Juliet

Abstract:

To some extent, language is actually a kind of art. A speaker of the language may quite often convey much more than what he literally says. The essence lies in how we understand and appreciate their language. Luckily, the Cooperative Principle (CP) is proposed, so the CP and the violation of CP enable us to interpret many efficient ways of language using and understanding in literature and daily life. As we all know, the literary works of Shakespeare are so great that even many short sentences and dialogues indicate much more than what they are literally said. Therefore, I want to interpret the implicatures of the dialogues in his drama Romeo and Juliet, with the theory of the Principles and violation of principles.

Key words: Cooperative Principle, violation, Maxim

Introduction:

As is known to us, the literal meaning of an utterance may be very different from the implicature of a speaker. Although a conversational implicature derives from its context, but how can the hearer manage to figure out it from the speaker? As for a speaker, how can he really mean a lot only by using the short and literal sentences? With these questions in mind, an American logician as well as philosopher, P. Grice proposed the Cooperative Principle (CP), which provides many interpretations of the effects

By answering “Not having that which, having, makes them short”, he didn’t avoid to answer Benvolio directly. With the second answer “out”, he uttered only a single word. And the final answer seemed to be squeezed out by his friend. The maxim of quantity is violated by his answers, and the uninformative answers show that his hesitation to express his trouble for