Cooperative Principle
The Cooperative Principle is a concept in linguistics proposed by philosopher H.P. Grice. It suggests that in conversation, people tend to cooperate by following certain principles, such as being truthful, relevant, and clear. This principle helps to explain how people understand implied meanings and make inferences during communication.
5 Key excerpts on "Cooperative Principle"
eBook - ePub- Betty J. Birner(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...These inferences, therefore, cannot be attributed to anything inherent in the word and alone; context affects its interpretation. Grice developed a way of addressing such contextual effects on interpretation. What Grice did was to identify a set of rules that interlocutors generally follow, and expect each other to follow, in conversation, and without which conversation would be impossible. These rules, in turn, are themselves various aspects of a single overarching principle, which Grice termed the Cooperative Principle. 2.1 The Cooperative Principle The basic idea behind the Cooperative Principle (CP) is that interlocutors, above all else, are attempting to be cooperative in conversation. Grice’s formulation of the CP is rather more detailed: The Cooperative Principle: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. (Grice 1975: 45) This boils down to an admonition to make your utterances appropriate to their conversational context – but again, since this is a descriptive rather than a prescriptive principle, what it really means is that interlocutors consistently do make their utterances appropriate in context. To do otherwise would be, in a word, uncooperative. Grice’s fundamental insight was that conversation can work only because both people are trying to be cooperative – trying to make their contribution appropriate to the conversation at hand...
eBook - ePub- John Flowerdew(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Grice referred to this as the ‘Cooperative Principle’ (CP). Following this discussion of the CP, the chapter will move on to consider the related phenomenon of politeness, another essential aspect of human interaction. We will consider how politeness relates to the CP, the conventions which are followed in order to maintain ‘polite’ behaviour, and different conceptions of how politeness might best be modelled and analysed. 6.2 THE Cooperative Principle In participating in an interaction, Grice assumed that participants observe the following principle: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged (Grice, 1989 [1967]: 26). Grice broke down this general principle into a number of subprinciples, which he referred to as maxims, as follows: Quantity • Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). • Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Quality • Do not say what you believe to be false. • Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Relation (or relevance) • Be relevant. Manner • Avoid obscurity of expression. • Avoid ambiguity. • Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity [verbosity]). • Be orderly. An example of observance of the principle and maxims would be in the following exchange: A: What’s the capital of Venezuela? B: Caracas. In this interaction, B has. clearly told the truth (quality), has provided no more and no less information than was required (quantity), has fulfilled A’s request for information (relation) and has done so in a clear and brief manner (manner). Grice considered his maxims as not only something that all people observe, but as ‘not merely something that all or most do in fact follow but as something that it is reasonable for us to follow, that we should not abandon.’ (p. 29)...
eBook - ePub- Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...4 Grice’s Principle of Cooperation 4.1 Gricean Pragmatics as Rational Cooperation The idea of cooperation and the Cooperative Principle (CP) was introduced by Grice in his 1967 William James lectures. The lectures were widely circulated as mimeographed transcripts, and then in a series of papers starting with the classic Logic and Conversation (Grice, 1975) and then collected as part of Grice posthumous Studies in the Way of Words (1989). Grice’s account of the CP and more precisely of the idea of implicature has been extremely influential in pragmatics, since it is relevant, among other things, to indirect speech acts (see Chapter 3), the classical rational theories of politeness (see Chapter 5), and the discussion on the boundary of semantics and pragmatics (see Chapter 1), not to mention that relevance theory (RT) is also inspired by Grice’s CP. Grice sees human beings as rational beings, that is, they are endowed with a capacity to evaluate things, choices, decisions, and pretty much anything on the basis of a set of values. Rationality can be defined as choosing the most efficient and least expensive way of achieving your goals: minimize costs and maximize benefits. The goals of speakers get evaluated from a rational viewpoint as well. Suppose you want to eat a donut. The rational (i.e., most efficient) way of doing so is to go to a place where they sell donuts (donut shop, general store, supermarket, etc.) and purchase one, typically for about $1 per donut and in a very limited amount of time. Alternative plans in our goal to eat a donut could involve cooking your own, which would require securing flour, eggs, milk, sugar, and so on and crucially large amounts of boiling-hot oil, which is expensive, time-consuming, difficult to do, and even dangerous...
eBook - ePubStrategic Communication
New Agendas in Communication
- Anthony Dudo, LeeAnn Kahlor, Anthony Dudo, LeeAnn Kahlor(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Moreover, both the speaker and the hearer hold a basic assumption about each other—the assumption that each conversation party is being cooperative in the conversation and will behave in a linguistically cooperative way, that is to make all efforts to understand and be understood. The assumption of cooperation is key to communication success, and has implications for the ensuing conversation. The Linguistic Cooperation Assumption in Interpersonal Conversation As mentioned, according to the Cooperation Principle (Grice, 1975; Levinson, 2000), normally in communication the speaker and the hearer assume that their party in conversation is being cooperative (otherwise why would they be engaged in conversation in the first place?). One of the ways to be cooperative is to adhere to certain accepted norms (Grice, 1975)—thus conversation parties expect each other to adhere to those norms. For example, when asking for the time, it is a norm to do it politely. If I address the passer-by with a phrase like “Tell me the time!” she would not only be surprised that I did not adhere to the politeness norm, but—being a cooperative conversation partner— she would look for a possible reason for this violation of the norms. In other words, she would try to find an intended meaning behind my impoliteness. Thus, the search for an intended meaning is an integral part of conversational cooperation. Speakers employ the cooperation assumption when choosing the language to employ in conversation. For example, when using irony (as in “you look so fresh this morning!”) the speaker assumes that the hearer will figure out the intended meaning (“you look exhausted”) based on contextual inferences, mutual knowledge, etc. An example of speakers adhering to conversational (and cultural) norms is Caldwell-Harris, Kronrod, and Yang’s (2013) work on the differences between Chinese and American cultures in the use of the phrase “I love you” (—“Wo ai ni” in Chinese)...
eBook - ePub- Geoffrey N. Leech(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 4 The interpersonal role of the Cooperative Principle It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. [Russell, Sceptical Essays, p. 1] Jack : Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me? [Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act III] In the remaining chapters, I shall investigate the interpersonal rhetoric in greater depth than has so far been possible. In this way, I shall be seeking answers to some major problems at the ‘pragmatic end of semantics’, by seeking to apply the model outlined in Chapters 2 and 3 to the description of English. I shall be considering, in particular, how to deal with politeness phenomena, illocutionary force, performatives, indirect illocutions, and the meanings of speech-act verbs. In this, I shall be treading some familiar ground, but the approach I shall use will be to some extent unfamiliar. For example, I shall be trying to show exactly how the CP and the PP interact in the interpretation of indirectness. If I can show that both these principles are required to account for pragmatic interpretations, I shall be on the way to explaining the need for a ‘rhetoric’, in the sense of a set of principles which are observed in the planning and interpretation of messages. 4.1 The Cooperative Principle (CP) and the Politeness Principle (PP) So much has been written in general support of Grice’s concept of the CP that I may take this principle to some extent for granted. But it is necessary to give some explanation here of (a) why the CP is needed, and (b) why it is not sufficient, as an explanation of the relation between sense and force. It will also be necessary to consider the function, in the present model, of each of its constituent maxims (see 4.2 – 5)...
