The Violation Of The Cooperative Principles In Catch-22

According to the Gricean theory of conversational implicature, the maxims of the Cooperative Principles are the premise and guarantee of conversation. However it does not mean that people must abide by these maxims invariably. In fact, people violate them here and there. As the manifest of the real life, the characters in novels also violate the maxims. Their violation of the Cooperative Principles may lead to misunderstanding, but in some occasions, it becomes an important means to convey the deep information from the writer to the reader.Published in 1961, the novel Catch-22 is named as an important work on war and the representative of Black Humor. This creative novel not only built up a new style of novel writing, but also provided a new behavior model for the American youth. Many scholars investigated the novel from the literature, the style and the society point of views. But the study which from linguistics, especially from pragmatic point of view, has not been recognized by people. Based on the achievement of English Humor and the relevant theories, this thesis tries to use Gricean theory-Cooperative principles to analyze this novel, and finally to prove that the violation of the CP is an important method in the production of Black Humor.