The Appropriateness Principle On Verbal Communication

How to make an appropriate utterance in verbal communication is a rather hot topic discussed not only in pragmatics and speech communication studies but also in the field of rhetoric. The British philosopher J. L. Austin's theory of speech act first distinguished three closely related kinds of speech acts: the Locutionary Act, the Illocutionary Act and the Perlocutionary Act. Based on Austin's Speech Act Theory, John R. Searle classified speech acts into five types: Assertives, Directives, Commissives, Expressives, and Declarations. Leech claimed that illocutionary functions may be classified into four types. These four types are competitive, convivial, collaborative and conflictive. Based on the above classifications, we classify speech acts broadly into two types: non-conflictive and conflictive. Pragmatic researchers have proposed theories concerning pragmatic principles such as Grice's Cooperative Principle (CP for short, whenever necessary) , Leech's Politeness Principle (PP for short, whenever necessary), Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Principle (RP for short, whenever necessary), Qian Guanlian's Goal-intention Principle (GP for short, whenever necessary) and Li Ruihua and Suo Zhenyu's Tact Principle (TP for short, whenever necessary). But these principles can, at their best, account for non-conflictive communication. Thus we propose the Appropriateness Principle to explain all kinds of communication from the perspectives of pragmatics, rhetoric and speech communication studies.