格莱斯的会话原则越意义理解 Grice S Cooperative principle getting the meaning across.pdfVIP

GRICE’S COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE: GETTING THE MEANING ACROSS Bethan Davies Abstract Grice’s Cooperative Principle is an assumed basic concept in pragmatics, yet its interpretation is often problematic. The use of the word ‘cooperative’ seems to lead to a confusion between Grice’s technical notion and the general meaning associated with the lexeme cooperation, leading to what we term ‘cooperation drift’. We argue that these misinterpretations stem, in part, from the relocation of the Cooperative Principle from philosophy to linguistics. In order to access a meaning that is more representative of Grice’s view, it is necessary to see the writings on the Cooperative Principle and implicatures in the context of Grice’s work as a whole. A close study of Grice’s writings shows the concept of cooperation to be peripheral to his thought: the recurring issues are the distinction between sentence-meaning and speaker-meaning, the idea of systematicity in language, and the centrality of rationality to human action. 1. Introduction This paper will be concerned with the way in which Grice’s Cooperative Principle is represented in the literature, and the interpretations to which this can lead. Our contention is that there is a tendency for Grice’s technical term to be confused with a folklinguistic notion of cooperation. Cooperation is a term often used in linguistic literature to characterise human behaviour in conversation. Sometimes it is used in the context of Grice’s Cooperative Principle (henceforth CP) (Grice, 1975), but it is also used independently. We suggest that these terms both being used in the context