A Study Of Conversational Implicature In Business English Conversations

Pragmatics, as an area of linguistics, has received considerable attention from linguists. Abundant efforts have been made to study pragmatic phenomena and different theories have been established. The cooperative principle is one of the most important concepts in pragmatics. Cooperative principle is proposed by the Oxford philosopher Herbert Paul Grice in William James lectures delivered at Harvard in 1967.Conversation is an important means to deliver and obtain information. In conversational exchange people usually try to reach a common goal by mutual efforts or at least make the conversation develop in the direction of their expectation. It is H. P. Grice who finds some rules working in human conversations and establishes his theory of conversational implicature.Business English is English especially related to international trade. Many non-native English speakers study business English with the goal of doing business with the United States or other English-speaking countries, or with companies located in non-native English-speaking areas but nonetheless using English as a shared second language.Conversations in business English is the most common way to build business relations or make a deal. By conversing, each side can get the useful information and understand the intention of the other, so it is meaningful to study business English conversations.The selected examples are classified into different categories according to the violation of each maxim of cooperative principle; meanwhile the factors of context and politeness principle are also taken into consideration. It is found that, in order to produce implicatures or obtain business goals, people in business English conversations often violate maxims. And sometimes, the reasons why people constantly flout the conversational maxims and convey their real intention in an indirect way are that they try not to damage others'face or save face.The writer, by analyzing business conversations in a pragmatic approach, believes that this thesis can make certain contribution to correctly understand the conversational implicatures in business English conversations and help people in business English conversations and shed light on the application of pragmatics.