对于美剧《生活大爆炸》的合作原则 礼貌原则研究

Co-operative principle and Politeness Principle

analysis on American sitcom big bang theory

Abstract

This paper entitled “Co-operative principle analysis on american sitcom big bang theory” discusses the analysis with the reference to linguistic theories, especially theories of pragmatics involving the cooperative principle in the overwelmingly popular american sitcom big bang theory.

First, the survey of Grice’s cooperative principle in pragmatics is mentioned as the theory foundation of this paper,which includes four maxims within. The maxims of conversation are respectfully the maxim of quality, the maxim of quantity, the maxim of relevance and the maxim of manner. And Leech’s Politeness Principle.

Then, brief introduction of american sitcom is the next part. From the point of historical and contemprary view.

Finally, comes the analysis of big bang theory (season4,episode8 and episode 9) with the reference of the cooperative principle theory in pragmatics.

Literature view

Pragmatics

In 1962, John Austin(1962) published his book How To Do Things With Words in Oxford. In 1970, John Searle (1970) published Speech Acts.The titles of these two publications, in themselves, highlight this fact: word and action are the one. An important approach to the act of speech lies in questioning not only what is said, and the manner in which it is said explicitly, but also what is left unsaid or said ambiguously, irrelevantly, indirectly. The latter is sometimes as effective as or even more effective than what is said plainly and clearly. The speaker’s intention and the effects of his words are subtler if we differntiate between what is apparent, immediate and what is effective but implicit, reflecting the speaker’s deep and true intentions. That gives rise to new discipline that often involves the inference of the meaning between the line, behind the line and beyond

the line, resulting in a new subject:Pragmatics.

Pragmatics is a systematic way of language studying in context. It seeks to explain meaning that cannot be explained by semantics only. As a field of language study, pragmatics is fairly new, practical and involves many other disciplines. We can say the study of pragmatics covers things that semantics has overlooked. As a branch of knowlege belonging to linguistic science, its roots lies in the work of Amerian philosopher Paul Grice(1975) on Conversational Implicature and the Cooperative Principle, and on the work of Stephen Levinson, Penelope Brown and Geoff Leech on politeness. The theories of the Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle have provided insights into interpersonal interactions.

Grice’s theory of implicature

Unlike many tother topics on pragmatics, implicature does not have an extended history. The key ideas were proposed by Grice in the William James lecture delivered at Harvard in 1967 and still only partially published (Grice, 1975, 1978). The proposals were relatively brief and only suggestive of how future work might proceed.

Before we review Grice’s suggestions it would be as well as to make clear that the other major theory associated with Grice, namely his theory of meaning-nn is not generally treated as having any connection with his theory of implicature (cf. Walker,1975). In fact there is a connection of an important kind. If, as we indicated, Grice’s theory o f meaning-nn is constructed as a theory of communication, it has the interesting consequence that it gives an account of how communication might be achieved in the absence of any conventional means for expressing the intended message.

A corollary is that it provides an account of how more can be communicated, in his rather strict sense of non-naturally meant, than what is actually said. Obviously we can, given an utterance, often drive a number of inferences from it; but not all those inferences may have be en communicative in Grice’s sense, i.e. intended to be recognized as having been intended. The kind of inferences that are called implicatures are always of this special intended kind, and the theory of implicatures sketches one way in which such inferences, of a non-conventional sort, can be conveyed while meeting the criterion of communicated