| For most scholars,it is a commonplace that there are divergences in the meaning between formal devices and their natural language counterparts. Among these people,some conclude that natural language is inadequate for clear and precise representation of meaning,and that it is necessary to devise an ideal language,incorporating the formal devices. Others believe that there are many inferences and arguments,expressed in natural language instead of formal devices,are recognizably valid,thus there is no need to construct such an ideal language. H. Paul. Grice,the American philosopher of language,however,has taken the position that natural languages are just as good as formal devices for making clear and precise statements. The 'extra' meanings that seem to crop up when certain kinds of natural language utterances are made,according to Grice,are due not to the syntactic or semantic rules of languages,but to rules and principles of conversation. To explain the fact that natural language utterances do not convey the same meanings that the corresponding logical devices would,in his William James Lectures at Harvard in 1967,Grice proposed the cooperative principle (abbreviated as CP:Make your conversational contribution such as is required,at which it occurs,by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange,in which you are engaged.) and associated set of conversational maxims (the maxim of quantity,of quality,of relation and of manner) by means of which conversational implicatures can be created in context.Significant as they are to the generation of any conversational implicature,the CP and its attendant conversational maxims,as soon as they were proposed,aroused general concern among scholars at home and abroad. In the efforts of extending,supplementing or modifying Grice's concepts of the CP and its associated four maxims,some western scholars developed their ideas and established a number of influential pragmatic principles. These pragmatic principles,in accordance with their treatment of the CP,can be roughly classified into four types,namely,replacement,as Kasher's principle of rationality;deletion,as Sperber & Wilson's principle of relevance;supplement,as Leech's politeness principle;and modification,as Levinson's Q-,I- and M- principles.In China,the CP research can be traced back to the early 1980s. Since then,researches flooded the Chinese circle of pragmatics. According to its development,the CP research experiences three stages:1) theoretical introduction - in which notions and contents of the CP and its maxims are introduced;2) theoretical research - in which different views are aired about the CP;3) practical application - in which application of the CP is attempted in various areas.Taking a broad view of the achievements attained in the past two decades,one can see that the CP research exhibits the following characteristics:1) The CP research entered in a period of boom in the 1990s;2) The application of the CP has become a topic of general interest for the research.Although achievements have been attained,certain problems are found to exist to some extent. In terms of their nature,these problems fall into specific problems and general problems. The former consist of problems cropped up in the introduction of the CP and its maxims,namely,neglecting the CP's philosophical elements,incomplete statement of the CP's notion,and confusing 'principle' with 'maxim',while the latter are related to those appearing in the process of research,which,in addition to weakness in theory construction,include such problems as lack of originality and simplicity in research method. Both specific and general problems would affect the quality of the CP research.In my view,two factors seem to have direct responsibility for the foregoing problems. One is incomplete reading of Grice's articles. After all,a reliance on second-hand accounts or incomplete understanding of Grice's ideas is quite likely to bring about an inadequate introduction of the CP. The other is lack of critical thinking. The long-standing...
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