A Case Study On The Violation Of Cooperative Principle In Consecutive Interpreting Between English And Chinese

With the increasing globalization and China’s economic strength, communications and exchanges between China and the outer world become more frequent. As a basic communication tool and media for people with different languages and cultures, interpreting attracts more and more attention.The Cooperative Principle is proposed by Herbert Paul Grice in1967as an important guiding principle for daily conversation, including four maxims:quantity maxim, quality maxim, relation maxim and manner maxim. Participants in oral exchanges are expected to observe the four maxims to achieve efficient communication. The cooperative principle is also of great guidance for interpretation, a kind of special communicative activity.Taking a real live interpreting, Doug Reeves’s lecture as the case, the thesis makes a deep analysis of the violation of cooperative principle in consecutive interpreting. It is divided into five chapters. Chapter one introduces the background and significance of the research as well as the general structure of the thesis. Chapter two is literature review in which a brief introduction of consecutive interpretation is firstly made, followed by the reviewing of previous studies on the application of cooperative principle in interpreting. Chapter three is the theoretical basis of this paper and it probes into the cooperative principle and its four maxims and the applicability of cooperative principle to interpreting. Chapter four is the main part of the thesis, the case study. It introduces the background of the case and makes a detailed classification and analysis of the violation of the cooperative principle in the case. Chapter five concludes the thesis with major findings and limitations and suggestions for further study.In the case study, it is found the interpreter violated the quantity maxim, the quality maxim, the relation maxim and the manner maxim more or less in interpreting in various situations. The case study provides a model or example of how to use the four maxims to analyze the performance of the interpreter. Interpreting learners can use the case study as a reference to analyze the performance of themselves in interpreting practices, find out where they violate which of the four maxims, thus they can correct those similar violations in the latter practices, gradually improving their interpreting capacity.