Some Doubts On The Universality Of Grice's Cooperative Principle From A Cross-cultural Perspective

Grice's Conversational Implicature theory made great contribution to linguistics especially pragmatics and the philosophical origin makes the Cooperative Principle more generalized and has a certain degree of explanatory power. However, like any other theories, the CP has its own inadequacies and limitations, which leads to hot debating and revisions from other linguists since it was put forward. The universality is one of the problems of the CP, as many scholars posed, and it is not applicable for any culture. Therefore, many linguists have proposed their own ideas against the flaws of CP and put forward the"New Gricean Pragmatic Mechanism"in order to restructure the Conversational Implicature theory.In recent years, a lot of famous linguists made considerable revisions from various aspects against Grice's theory. Fruitful achievements have been made since CP theory come into being. Nevertheless, compared with these newly raised theories, research on cross-cultural perspective is not comprehensive and full-sided. Most scholars found the incompatibility of CP beyond English-speaking culture, but few efforts have been made on the systematic analysis of the Chinese language and Cooperative Principle.This thesis focuses on the incompatibility of CP in China from the cross-cultural perspective and limits its scope of analysis to compliments, especially the responses to compliments in Chinese. The Individualism-Collectivism and High-Low context theories are the theoretical basis applied to analysis of flouting the maxims of CP in Chinese and English compliments. The findings show that the four maxims of CP are frequently flouted in responses to compliments in Chinese without generating any conversational implicatures, which deviates from the Grice's CI theory.On one hand, the contrastive studies from the cross-cultural perspective have certain values on reference to the cross-cultural communication and will lead to the rethinking of the classical of Grice's cooperative principle. On the other hand, this thesis enables us to note that different conversational implicatures exist in different cultures and helps to enhance people's communicative competence.