Exploration Of Pragmatic Strategies In Chatroom Conversations Violation And Compensation Of CP & PP

In the global information age, computer-mediated communication (CMC), as the mainstream of social intercourse, has attracted attention of all circles of society, therefore it has also provided a new field for linguistic research. Some linguists even predict that "Internet Linguistics," a new branch of linguistics, is coming into being. Up to now, some empirical studies of CMC have been done from the perspective of various features of linguistic forms; however, as for the pragmatic research of CMC, it was seldom referred. Thus, there is a pressing need for descriptive and empirical research from the angle of pragmatics of CMC so as to promote the satisfactory communication on the Internet.This thesis is oriented to make a tentative study on internet chatroom conversations fromthe perspective of pragmatic strategies, specifically from violations of Co-operative Principle(Grice , 1975) and Politeness Principle ( Leech , 1983) based on incompleteness theoremin order to explore the possibility of the extension of original pragmatic strategies into somenew compensational pragmatic principles which may be adopted by more and more netizens inCMC and compatible with the new internet linguistic times. Considering fidelity of the dataand accuracy of this research, this research employs qualitative investigation of transcriptionmainly downloaded from several current well-liked chat rooms with the length of 20 minutesper day in nearly two months., and questionnaire survey related with the core of this research.The thesis is inspired by and derived form the following questions:1. Do Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle, as fundamental concepts in pragmatics and discourse analysis, work the same in online chatroom conversations as in offline face-to-face conversations?2. If it is possible that violations of maxims of CP and PP exist in chatroom conversations, for what reason are maxims of CP and PP violated?3. In which ways do the study subjects (participants in different chatroom) fail to fulfill the Grecian maxims and Leech maxims?4. Do failures to fulfill these maxims of CP& PP in chatroom conversations give rise to the use of any compensational strategies to ensure successful communication?The following major expected findings are concluded as follows:Firstly, Co-operative principle and Politeness Principle, with universal applicability, are still adapted in CMC, whereas there are more and more cases in which the two pragmatic principles have already been devalued and even violated in chatroom conversations.Furthermore, it is because there are a variety of distinctive features which are unique (?) the Internet that violating CP and PP have already become inevitable and commonplace in CMC in order to keep pace with development and necessity of internet communication.Moreover, in internet communication, internet users are used to a series of approaches of interlocutions which broke original pragmatic principles, in order to satisfy their own communicative purposes.Lastly, the conclusion is that when the original pragmatic principles are breached, there will be some new compensational pragmatic principle adopted by netizens in CMC so as to ensure satisfactory communication on the Internet.The major findings can be concluded that more and more practical and adaptable pragmatic principles emerge in CMC, such as: (a) idle-talk principle, ironic principle, humor principle; (b) economic principle , symbolic principle; (c) free principle, recreational principle; (d) irregular turn-taking principle and double-topic or multi-subjects parallel-propelled principle which could compensate for the incompleteness of CP ; and more other principles also come into use which will make up for the incompleteness of PP, such as (a) Pollyanna Principle(Leech, 1983), (b) banter principle, (c) tolerance principle, (d) equality principle, (e) maintenance principle and so on .In view of the limitless pragmatic strategies in communication , this is just a pilot study on pragmatics of CMC . The author hopes this thesis can inspire more researchers' interests in this field so that CMC can be promoted and perfected.