Body Language In Interpreting Conversational Implicature

The theory of conversational implicature was proposed by H.Paul.Grice. In the William James Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1967, Grice's proposals were very brief. Later he gradually made this theory completed. In his published papers, Grice developed the concept of conversational implicature.Conversational implicature theory is one of the essential theories in pragmatics. Generally it tells how people use language, and how they figure out the meanings beyond words. In order to make sure that conversations can go on smoothly, Grice advanced that the participants concerned in conversations should all adhere to a set of fundamental rules. Based on considerations on the four foundamental philosophical concepts, Grice formulated four basic maxims to guide the conduct of conversations. These maxims offer the guidelines for efficient and successful conversations, and are expressed as the cooperative principle. The maxims refer to quality, quantity, relevance and manner respectively.Although participants are supposed to obey Grice's cooperative principle during the conversational process, there are a lot of occasions when they fail to observe or intentionally disobey the four basic maxims in cooperative principle. Therefore the non-observance of these maxims will result in the producing of implicatures. According to different kinds of non-observances, this paper makes a brief introduction to them one by one, and lists how they lead to the producing of implicatures. There are two purposes for the illustrations made in the above. One is to state how we generate conversational implicatures, based on Grice's principle and four maxims, and the other purpose is to set the necessary foundation for the explanations in the following parts.Body language belongs to the field of nonverbal language. Even it has been studied as early as Aristotle, but only from Darwin did people begin the formal studieson this subject. As for the definition and classification of body language, there are considerable opinions. Generally speaking, in this paper body language refers to those of facial expressions, body actions, and other gestures made by any part of man's body. Body language functions significantly in communications. The paper lists five kinds of functions worked by body language.From the aspect of function, verbal language is the most important means in transferring information. From the angle of nature, verbal language is a kind of signs. Similarly, Body language is also a kind of information-carrier, since it can transit certain quantity of information in communications. Being a kind of signs, it displays similar functions with verbal language. In interpreting conversational implicature, body language can cooperate well with Grice's cooperative principle. To illustrate this point, the paper offers three theoretical proofs, which are proof of physiology, proof of semilology, and proof from the imperfections of functions of verbal language. In addition to that, this paper also manifests this point in practice. It chooses four examples from the Chinese classical novel A Dream of Red Mansions. By detailed analysing the four excerpts, the paper makes it clearer that to interpret conversational implicatures, people can achieve it by analysing the flouting of cooperative principle. But to some degree, there are always some implicatures left untransitted or untouched by the cooperative principle. Hence the functions of body language seem indispensable in fully interpreting conversational implicatures. With vivid examples, the paper provides a good manifestation for this.