The Study Of Conversational Implicature In Political Interviews

Conversational implicatures in pragmatics is the meaning deduced by the Cooperative Principle and its maxims to bridge the gap between the language forms and the speaker's intended meaning. CP and its maxims which work as the guideline for human communication are based on the deep presumption that the communicators must observe while communicating. CP and Face Theory prove to be very useful in explaining the CI in daily language communication.There are a few researches on political interviews, but most of the previous study focuses on equivalence, face-saving strategies, or misunderstanding in political interviews, etc., and few are studied from the perspective of CI. Under the frameworks of Grice's CP, Presupposition, context, and Face theory, and based on the collected data of 20 political interviews, the present paper centers on CI in political interviews to study the following issues: firstly, according to CP, the violation of any of its maxims is regarded as the sign of appearance of CI. The paper cited many examples from the data to show that political interviews are rich in CI, in which each example represents a phenomenon. Secondly, the use of CI in political interviews can help achieve special effects, which can be summarized as two aspects: to avoid being put into passive position, and safeguard his public image. Thirdly, we will make use of presupposition and context to interpret CI. Presupposition and context are two most important factors in the process of conveying and inferring CI. Presupposition is a prerequisite of CI and can also be regarded as the context of CI. Context, as an integrated part of pragmatics, plays an important part in deriving CI. Presupposition and context are correlative.The implication of the study exists in two aspects: firstly, it guides the interpretation of CI in political interviews, further deepens our understanding of diplomacy. Secondly, the author holds that the interpretation of CI is a process of restoring of presupposition and context, which is beneficial to instruct the understanding of the text in teaching.