Analysis Of Conversational Implicatures In The Big Bang Theory From The Perspectives Of Cooperative Principle And Politeness Principle

The emergence of pragmatics has paved a new way for literary criticism and literary pragmatics since 1980 s. As the core content of pragmatics, the conversational implicature is a theory about how to apply language in communications to achieve some certain goals.The Cooperative Principle(CP) was firstly proposed by American linguist H. P. Grice in his book Logic and Conversation in 1975. Based on the concept of Face put forward by Goffman and the Face Theory given by Brown and Levinson, British scholar Leech(1983) proposed Politeness Principle(PP) in Principles of Pragmatics from the perspectives of rhetoric and stylistics, which is reasonable and effective correction and supplement to CP. After CP and PP were put forward, both of them have been applied into the field of pragmatics and they have been developed and improved through the common efforts of numerous scholars. Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory(1986), Levinson’s Three Principles of Conversational Implicatures(1987), and Xu Shenghuan’s Pragmatic Apparatus(1993) all promote the development of CP and widen the applied areas where CP can be applied. Bruce Fraser’s Anticipated Politeness(1990), Xu Shenghuan’s New Politeness Principle(1992), Scollon and Suzanne W. Scollon’s Politeness Principle(2000) establish three kinds of politeness systems. Besides, Wang Jianhua’s Pragmatics Distance Principle(2002) and Hou Guojin’s theory of Dynamic Appropriate Communication(2003) all push forward the development of PP. Despite these, CP and PP themselves lack systematicness in interpreting conversational implicatures. The combination of the two theories can illustrate the conversational implicatures deeply and thoroughly. Besides, the explanatory powers of the two theories are increased when they are combined to interpret the conversational implicatures. A review of literature home and abroad reveals that previous studies on conversational implicatures are mostly restricted to pure linguistic forms, with little reference to implicatures generating in specific contexts such as sitcoms, language learning and teaching.Sitcom appears in the USA in 1920 s, which is an encyclopedia concerning with one country’s lives, cultures and customs. Previous researches on sitcoms were mainly concerned with humor analysis, strategies of subtitle translation and so on and researches on conversational implicatures are far from enough. The Big Bang Theory enjoys high popularity among audiences and the thesis selects the characters’ conversations as the research object based on CP and PP. The author transcripts, processes and analyzes the samples to obtain statistics for the research.According to the collected statistics, there are substantial cases of violating CP and PP. The author classifies different types of violating CP and calculates the percentage of each maxim violating CP among the cases, including violating the quality maxim, the quantity maxim, the relation maxim and the manner maxim; types and percentage of the cases about violating PP, including violating the maxims of tact and generosity, maxims of approbation and modesty, maxims of agreement and sympathy. From the perspective of the relationship between CP and PP, the study analyzes the communicative strategies which are frequently adopted by the participants of communication, and then summarizes factors that influence the violation of conversational principles and analyzes the generation mechanism of conversational implicatures.The present study leads to the following findings: most of implicatures have relationship with CP and PP, and implicatures that result from violating CP take up the majority of all the samples. Besides, in terms of violating CP, the violating of quality is the most frequent type, followed by violating the quantity maxim, relation maxim and manner maxim. As for the violation of PP, maxims of tact and agreement are frequently infringed, followed by violating maxims of generosity, modesty, approbation and sympathy subsequently. The analysis also deals with the priority of CP or PP when the participants face a clash between the two principles. There are some relevant factors, such as speaker’s common sense in their interaction, the degree of topic’s formality and social distance of participants.Based on the collected statistics, the present study specifically explores the generation mechanism of conversational implicatures, factors that influence the generation of conversational implicatures and types of conversational implicatures, aiming to reveal general rules of conversations and communicative strategies of the sitcoms, and then provides some beneficial enlightenment for daily communications as well as some other fields.