An Analysis Of The Cooperative Principe And Politeness Principle

In recent years, pragmatics has made great progress and occupies important statusin linguistics. Linguists has made a lot of study on pragmatic phenomenon andestablished different theories, especially for communication. In1967, Grice proposedthe cooperative principle in Logic and Conversation, which provides a set of maximsfor people to obey in conversations. His theory is referential and constructive. However,in the actual life, people often violate the cooperative principle. Leech first formulateshis politeness principle to rescue Grice’s cooperative principle and explainconversational implicature. After him Brown and Levinson put forward their politenesstheory. This thesis, adopting Grice’s cooperative principle, Leech’s politeness principleand Brown and Levinson’s face-saving theory, takes the conversations in Pride andPrejudice for example to analyze conversations in English, aiming to specificallyexplain why people violate the cooperative principle and show how people usepoliteness and face idea in their utterances. It will help the researcher and hearer tounderstand others’ conversational implicature in communication when they violate thecooperative principle and know how to behave in conversation well.Pride and Prejudice, a world famous book written by Jane Austen, is a verywonderful story. There are many characters and conversations in this novel. And thereare many implications in these conversations. That’s to say, what they convey is farmore than what they literally mean, apart from offering laughter and amusement. Theauthor will read the whole book and select the typical examples, then according to thecooperative principle, the politeness principle and face-saving theory, identify andclassify them into three types: violating the cooperative principle, adopting thepoliteness principle and employing the face-saving strategies, at last analyze eachexample in detail and give explanations on why people take that language behavior.Based on the detailed study, we notice that politeness and face play an importantrole in people’s communication. They are the most considered facts in conversationsindeed. People often violate the cooperative principle to show their politeness to othersor to save their or others’face.