A Study Of Social Presence Relevant To Cooperative Principle And Politeness Principle In QQ Chatting

QQ chatting is one of the most preferable computer-mediated communications (CMC). The purpose of this thesis is an attempt to probe into the relationships of social presence (SP) with social relationships, Cooperative Principle (CP) and Politeness Principle (PP) during QQ chatting.SP includes three categories and 8 subcategories, whose contributions to SP vary. Therefore, weighted average formula, a significant method in statistics, is adopted to figure out their weighting coefficient or values of different categories. And the sum of the coefficients equals to 1. Specifically speaking, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is employed to make the quantitative and qualitative analyses and set up matrix A, and to determine the weighting coefficient of different categories (indexes) of SP. Content Analysis (CA) is adopted to make a qualitative analysis of chatting transcripts in Tencent QQ to ascertain whether social presence is related to social relationship, Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle and their respective maxims.The results of this analysis indicate that the level of SP is closely related to social relationship. The more intimate the interlocutors are, the higher the level of SP is. It is also found that social status has an effect on social presence and online communication to some degree when they are familiars in real life, while it has little effect when they are strangers in real life. Nevertheless, the level of SP is not significantly related to gender or educational background. In addition, it is shown that the higher the degree of SP is, the less likelihood they comply with the maxims, especially the quantity maxim and the relation maxim in Cooperative Principle and the appraise maxim in Politeness Principle. Special attention should be paid to the agreement maxim. In cyber space, people frequently express their disagreements directly no matter when they communicate with familiars or strangers. On this point, it is different from those in the previous researches.