Co-consitituting Politeness Implicature: Evidence In Chinese Conversations

The constant importance of politeness phenomena in language communication has been acknowledged by scholars of various disciplines. While this phenomena has been fully attended to, its immediate connection with the notion of conversational implicature has been noticed by many linguists (Brown & Levinson 1987; Leech, 1983, 2003, 2005; Killia, 2004, Terkourafi, 2003, 2005). However, the intersection of these two important phenomena has never been fully accounted for until an Australian linguist Haugh (2002, 2007) proposes the notion of"politeness implicature"and he suggests that an account of this particular kind of implicature will be better placed in Conjoint Co-Constitutional Model of Communication (Arundale,1999). It is an newly-developed interactional model, which is constructed in linguistics with an assumption that the emergence and non-summative properties are the key characteristics of human communication, serving as an alternative to the intention-based communication models, which are advocated by Gricean (Grice, 1989), neo-Gricean ( Levinson 1983, 2000), and Relevance theorists (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) .This thesis aims at exploring the validity of the model and elaborating the research of co-constituting politeness implicature by analyzing naturally occurring Chinese conversations. Twenty naturally occurring Chinese conversations are collected for analysis and discussion, and from these conversations the author has randomly selected four for detailed analysis by the three principles proposed in the Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communication. Through the discussion of research questions previously proposed, it is believed that politeness implicature is a conjoint achievement of the interactants in Chinese conversations and it is more likely to arise in the form of particularized conversational implicature. Moreover, from the discussion of various contextual factors in these conversations, it is demonstrated that politeness implicature is conjointly co-constituted by utilizing various kinds of contextual factors that are made salient in the situation as a whole.