abstract: there are some conversational principles necessary for a successful conversation. one is the cooperative principle of four maxims. violating any one of the four maxims will give rise to conversational implicatures; the other is the politeness principle, proposed to rescue the cooperative principle.
to draw pragmatic implications from the violation of the cooperative principle is of no difference between the west and the east. what are different lies in people’s choice of the maxims of the cooperative principle and this is due to different cultural background. chinese-styled politeness is characterized by four aspects: respectfulness, modesty, attitudinal warmth and refinement.
language, as a special form of communication, may be viewed as a system, as a vehicle for cultural transmission. it does not exist apart from culture. thus, language and cultural are interactive and understanding of one requires understanding of the other. to better achieve the communicative goal, it is necessary to choose the appreciate way of expression under certain circumstances and cultural factors plays an important role in using language effectively.
key words: cultural difference; conversational principles ; cooperative principle ; politeness principle
few areas of people’s experience are closer to them or more continuously with them than their language—they have to communicate by speaking, listening, reading and writing in everyday life. in the course of communication, it is no doubt that speech enjoys priority not only because it precedes writing in terms of evolution, but a large amount of communication is carried out in conversation as well. an ideal conversation is usually assumed to be carried out by “turn-taking” and thus the meanings of the utterance are expressed accordingly. however, the real intentions of the speakers cannot always be drawn by simply interpreting the surface meanings of the words in the utterance, for people often tend to mean more in a roundabout way than what they actually say. let’s first look at an example which took place on the campus at noon:
devin: what time is it?
jakie: the students are going to the dining hall.
here, jakie’s answer doesn’t seem to make sense on the face of it, but it is still an adequate answer for devin, because the particular contexts of this conversation include the fact that the students usually have lunch at about 11:30 in the university and devin is aware of this. it is possible for devin to work out the time by interpreting or guessing what jakie says and the more she knows about the context, the more qualified her guesswork is going to be.
normally in conversational interaction, people work on the assumption that a certain set of rules is in operation, unless they receive indications to the contrary. for example, if jakie gives the same answer to a stranger, it’ll likely lead to communication breakdown because nobody expects a successful conversation in which people try to confuse, trick, or withhold relevant information from each other. in other words, a successful conversation should be the fruit of all the participants’ efforts and collaboration is a necessary factor for them to achieve a certain goal. therefore, people are expected to be cooperate during a conversation, and such cooperative mechanisms have very little to do with logic and semantics, but are grounded in some pragmatic principles, especially the cooperative principle.
in 1967, american philosopher h.p. grice put forward the cooperative principle in logic and conversation: “make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged” (yule, 37). supporting this principle is the four maxims: quantity maxim: make your contribution as informative as is required, but not more, or less, than is required. quality maxim: do not say that which you believe to be false or for which you lack evidence. relation maxim: be relevant. manner maxim: be clear, brief and orderly.
the importance of this principle lies in two aspects: firstly, it is the first time to systematically induce people’s conversational activities into law. secondly, when violation of the cooperative principle takes place, in one case, understanding of the discourse is hindered and the speaker should make remedies immediately to smooth the conversation; in another case, if the speaker does so intentionally, there will be more to it than what is said. conversational implicatures, in this way, will be given rise to.
1．violation of the quantity maxim
1.1 知之为知之，不知为不知。WWW.11665.Com（《论语》）
in this sentence, repetition of the same word appears twice, which accords with the formula “p=p”. from a purely logical perspective, the sentence has no communicative value since it expresses something completely obvious, but it can be understood easily that this sentence primarily advises people to be honest in engaging in scholarship. similar apparently pointless expressions are “business is business” and “girls are girls”. this kind of phenomenon is called tautology. when tautology is applied in a conversation, it is clear that the speaker intends to express more than is said. usually, this kind of usage has strong sense of emotion.
1.2 polonius: what do you read, my lord?
hamlet: words, words, words. (shakespeare, hamlet)
1.3 “我们是睡在鼓里，等人家来杀！等人家来杀！”(矛盾：《子夜》)
from polonius’ perspective, hamlet’s answer provides less information than expected. for “words” being the object of “read” seems to be too general and polonius still did not know what hamlet read. in fact, repetition of the word “words” shows hamlet’s strong impatience that he was unwilling to talk to polonius. in another point of view, from the fact that polonius’s attitude is warm and cooperative while hamlet’s attitude is impatient and indifferent, there must be some implications. similarly in example 3, repetition of a sentence shows the speaker’s strong indignation.
2． violation of the quality maxim
2.1 南唐时，赋税繁重，京城地区又遭旱灾，人民叫苦连天。一天，烈祖在北苑饮宴，对群臣说：“外地都下雨了，只是都城却不下雨，怎么回事呢？”申渐应到：“雨不感入城，是怕抽税而已。”烈祖大笑，马上下令除掉重税。（《古今谭概—微词》）
violation of the quality maxim has two cases, one case is a kind of “moral offence”, which means that the speaker is unwilling to observe the quality maxim and is lying. the other case is a kind of “false lie”, which means that the speaker is unwilling to cooperative and is trying to express implicit meaning. in this example, shen jian cleverly used personification that even the rain is scared of the tax because the man he talked to was the king of the dynasty. just think of the impossibility of abolishing the heavy taxation if shen jian used blunt words to remonstrate!
2.2 tommy: mother! the lorry going by is as big as a mountain!
mother: why, dear, i’ve told you over ten thousand times not to exaggerate things so terribly and your bad habit remains unchanged.
it is believed that there is no such a lorry as big as a mountain on earth and it is also believed that the mother could not have told her soon over ten thousand times. hyperbole, just like irony, metaphor and meiosis are all the results that violate the quality maxim. of course, if the mother herself had not exaggerated, the story would not be so funny.
3． violation of the relation maxim
3.1 周冲：爸， 我听说矿上对于这次受伤的工人不给一点抚恤金。
周朴园：（头一扬）我认为你这次话说得太多了。（《雷雨》）
zhou puyuan did not provide any information about what zhou chong was interested in. on the contrary, he used a performative utterance: to let zhou chong shut up. violation of the relation maxim, in fact, is used to prevent zhou chong talking about matters concerning the accident in the mines and injuries of the workers.
3.2 another example comes from a true story of the writer. one day she asked one of her students to read the text in class. owing to lack of concentration, the student misread another text, so the writer said, “你的书是那个版本的?” instead of direct criticizing. all the class had a good laugh, including the boy himself, but everyone understood her intention of irony.
4． violation of the manner maxim
4.1 “一个人死了之后，究竟有没有魂灵？”
“也许有罢，我想。”我于是吞吞吐吐地说。
“那么，也就有地狱了？”
“啊！地狱？”我很吃惊，只得支吾着，“地狱？论理，就该也有。然而也未必……谁来管这等事……”(《祝福》)
to violate the manner maxim means that the speaker speaks obscurely and ambiguously instead of speaking briefly and orderly. lu xun is a great master of language, so he used mild and indirect words in place of more accurate or direct words in order not to bring mental agony to her. also, pun, which is “a form of speech play in which a word or phrase unexpectedly and simultaneously combines two unrelated meanings” (huang, 139), is often used to produce conversational implicature.
4.2 mrs. jones: we’re going to be neighbors now. we’ve brought a home next to you, right on the edge of the lake.
mrs. brown: so glad! hope you’ll drop in sometimes.
4.3 i finally figured out how government works. the senate gets the bill from the house, the president gets the bill from the senate, and we get the bill for everything.
the key word in example 2 is “drop”, which bears the meaning “fall” and leaves space to the readers to imagine if mrs. jones fell into the lake. if mrs. brown changed the ambiguous “drop” into “visit”, no humor will be produced. in example 3, the first and the second “bill”s refer to the draft of a proposed law, while the third one refers to a written statement of money owned. the author satirically exposes the corruption of the officials, while the common people have to bear the burden.
since people should follow the cooperative principle in conversation, then why do they violate it? why do not they state their views frankly, but let their listeners recognize the communicated meanings via inference? g. leech has proposed the politeness principle to rescue the cooperative principle. in his point of view, the reason why people violate the cooperative principle is out of the consideration of politeness. so the more people know about the politeness principle, the better they understand conversational implicatures.
before talking about the politeness principle, the face theory should be introduced. as a technical term, face means the public self-image of a person. it refers too that emotional and social sense of self that everyone has and expects everyone else to recognize. that is to say, people have the need to be connected, which is called positive face, and the need to be independent, which is called negative face. in order to keep the listener’s positive face, the speaker should fall in with his listener’s wishes; at the same time, his own negative face is threatened. also, in order to keep the listener’s negative face, the speaker should apologize, belittle himself and talk ambiguously, while his own positive face is threatened simultaneously. so people’ conversational activities are actually face threatening acts. in order to keep his listener’s face as well as his, the best way for the speaker to do is to be polite.
politeness, in an interaction, refers to the means employed to show awareness of another person’s face. in leech’s politeness principle, there are six means or maxims as follows: tact maxim, generosity maxim, approbation maxim, modesty maxim, and agreement maxim and sympathy maxim. in 2.1 shen jian had to determine, as he spoke, the relative social distance between him and the emperor and hence the emperor’s “face wants”, which refers to a person’s expectations that their public self-image will be respected. the emperor is supreme and shen jian successfully applied the tact maxim. lu xun also applied the politeness principle in example 4.1.
to draw pragmatic implications from the violation of the cooperative principle is of no difference between the west and the east. what is a different lie in people’s choice of the maxims of the cooperative principle. for example:
1. a: you dance well.
b: i’m glad to hear that.
2. an english teacher is praising a chinese girl’s calligraphy, “oh, what beautiful handwriting!” but the girl replied, “no, no, not at all.” “you’re joking.” the english teacher became angry and went away.
here, neither b’s reply is immodest nor the chinese girl’s remark is insincere. the reason why the english teacher became angry and went away is that the girl has made a great mistake—she unintentionally makes the foreign teacher feel being mocked. such kind of mistake is called “pragmatic failure”, that is to say, the inability to understand what is meant by what is said. by culture, we mean "a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that the member of a society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning"(bates, 28). generally speaking, chinese pay more attention to the politeness principle while the westerners lay more emphasis on the cooperative principle, and chinese-styled politeness is characterized by four aspects: respectfulness, modesty, attitudinal warmth and refinement.
respectfulness means to respect oneself and appreciate others, and to show awareness of another person’s face. one peculiar example can be found in the chinese and the english–speaking people’s different ways of address. in recent years, the trend of many english-speaking people has been to address others by using the first name, even when people meet for the first time. this applies to people of different age and different social status. for example, many college students call their professors by their first names. the professors do not regard this as a sign of disrespect or familiarity, but rather, as an indication that the professor is considered affable and has a sense of equality. also, it is not at all uncommon to hear a child calling a much older person “joe, ben” etc. this, of course, is quite counter to chinese custom. one can imagine the reactions of adults of a child were to call a grandparent by his or her first name, or a student to do the same in calling a teacher. a quick reprimand, and possibly even a spanking for the child, would be sure to follow.
modesty, which is regarded as a kind of virtue by chinese, means to belittle oneself and praise others. to english-speaking people, praise is to be accepted, generally with a remark like “thank you” or “i’m very glad to hear that”. it is assumed that the compliment is sincere; therefore, there should be no show of false humility, no pretended modesty; to chinese, however, the customary reply to a compliment would be to claim that one is hardly enough or that success was more a matter of luck or some other circumstances. acceptance of a compliment would imply conceit or lack of manners, and the chinese generally murmur some replies about not being worthy of the praise. this also explains why in some westerners’ eyes, the easterners are inferior, hypocritical and insincere. so it would not be unusual to hear an american woman talking about how hard her husband works and how well he has done, about all the promotions and honors that he has received. she might do the same about her children. but in china, this would be considered bad taste: one simply does not praise members of one’s own family in front of others. another example of a chinese taboo is complimenting a man on his wife’s looks. many chinese, especially, those beyond their youth, would regard the remake “you have a lovely wife” as almost indecent. yet the same compliment would be considered perfectly natural and even highly appreciated by westerners.
attitudinal warmth means the chinese seem to show much concern about the other people. one typical way for the chinese to show care is to ask other people ages income, or material status. for example, “how old are you?” “how much do you make?” “so you’re divorced? what was the reason? couldn’t you two get along?” all of these aspects are considered as privacy on which english–speaking people place a high value. the english have a saying “a man’s home is his castle”, meaning a man’s home is sacred to him; no one should come inn without permission. it is also with his life and personal affairs. so these questions are considered prying into an individual’s personal life, which is another form of invading a person’s “castle”.
refinement means too speak in mild and elegant way. then the chinese intend to praise one’s noble character, they may use “松，竹，梅” to imply “高风亮节”, but “pine, bamboo and plum”cannot recall the same meaning to the english-speaking people.“柳”in chinese culture often has such a bad sense as“花街柳巷”，“寻花问柳”，while in english culture it is a symbol of misery. also“秋”is connected with“悲，凉，伤，愁”in chinese culture, such as “逢秋悲寂寞”,“夜静风竹敲秋韵，万叶千起皆是恨”，but it is just the contrary that autumn is always associated with tranquility and merriment in english culture.
in respect to marriage and love, the chinese are more reserved and self-restrained, especially in the old days. it is seldom for them to express their passion as “i’m dying to marry you, i want to be my wife, or i’ll devote myself to you.” the following examples provide a sharp contrast:
宝玉，黛玉一起偷读《西厢记》后，宝玉笑道：“妹妹，你说（书）好不好？”黛玉笑着点头儿。宝玉笑道：“我就是多愁多病的身， 你就是那倾国倾城的貌。”黛玉听了，不觉带腮连耳的通红了……桃腮带怒，薄面含嗔，指着宝玉道：“你这该死的，胡说了，好好儿的，把这些淫词艳曲弄了来，说这些混帐话，欺负我…… ”说到“欺负”二字，就把眼圈儿红了，转身就走。（《红楼梦》）
“if it’s crazy to love you, i guess i am” marva stopped her steps and said,” then that makes two of us” maurice, feeling encouraged, clutched her to him, held her in hid tight grip…and put his lips on hers.(h. e. harper’s magazine reader)
marva spoke out “love you” straightforward and mauricew naturally kissed her. this is the common way for the westerners to unbosom themselves. what they consider first is to follow the quality maxim. while in the first example, though jia baoyv and lin daiyv loved each other, jia baoyv revealed his feeling via an illusion and lin daiyv pretended to be offended. this, again, reflects traditional chinese social moral and value concept. people would rather sacrifice the truth to get amity and unity. so they would better sacrifice the quality maxim and the manner maxim.
language, as a special form of communication, may be viewed as a system, as a vehicle for cultural transmission. it does not exist apart from culture. thus, language and cultural are interactive and understanding of one requires understanding of the other. speaking and writing are all based on the need of social communication. to better achieve the communicative goal, it is necessary to choose the appreciate way of expression under certain circumstances. in speech one can express meanings effectively with the help of gestures, facial expressions, or tone of voice. for example, when one says “he’s a generous guy!” if one gives a sarcastic intonation to the word “generous”, then the sense of the word “generous” is twisted into “stingy”. in writing, it is primarily the concept—the other words in the sentence, paragraph, or even the total composition and background of the people, including their cultural concept, status, profession, age—that controls a figurative word, pointing its meaning in a special direction. since rhetoric is the art of using language effectively and involves practicing the most effective means or strategies for informing or persuading the others, then deciding what to write or speak and how to write or speak, how best to get one’s article or speech effectively requires not only creativity and imagination, but also good background knowledge of both the speaker and the hearer, too. thus cultural factors play an important role in using language effectively.
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