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Besides the expressive descriptions of the social life and the love story, what leaves a deep impression is the use of Cooperative Principle and conversational implicature in this novel. It was Oxford philosopher Herbert Paul Grice that firstly proposed the theory of conversational implicature and noted that in daily conversations, people do not usually say things directly. On the contrary, they often tend to imply them. He insisted that “our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction” (Grice, 1975:45). He also believed that people follow some principles when they have a conversation with others. This principle is known as the Cooperative Principle or CP for short. There are four categories maxims introduced by Grice: Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner. When people disobey those or one of those maxims, the sentence will generate conversational implicatures.
Thanks to the application of the Cooperative Principle, the characteristics of the figures in the novel are vivid, leaving deep impression on readers. For example, the hero in the novel, Rhett, was portrayed as a calm, smart and cynical man. He was also a master of language, for he was good at harnessing irony and pun to despise those outmoded conventions and customs in south area. His characteristics are reflected obviously by those implicatures, which are generated by the irony and pun. In other words, he disobeyed the maxims of Cooperative Principle.
This paper mainly focuses on the embodiment of Cooperative Principles used in conversations of Gone with the Wind, and analyses how the figures create profuse conventional implicatures by obeying and violating those Cooperative Principles. Moreover, it will illustrate how the author presented the images, characteristics and communicative intentions of those figures by using the conventional implicatures. Finally, this paper will also demonstrate the effectiveness and the significance of using pragmatics to analyze the literature text.
2 Studies on Development of Cooperative Principle
After Grice proposed the concept of Cooperative Principle and conversational implicature, many scholars were attracted by theory and started to do research on it. They had proposed many theories or ideas based on that theory. They also paid a lot of attention to the study of this application and made contribution to the development of Pragmatics.
2.1 Studies on Cooperative Principle Abroad
The theory of Cooperative Principle plays an important role in pragmatics. It was proposed by American philosopher, logician and linguist Herbert Paul Grice. Through records we can know that Oxford philosopher Herbert Paul Grice began to formulate his ideas of this theory in the fifties of the 20th century. However, this theory known by the public was delivered by William James through lectures at Harvard in 1967. Part of the lectures was published in 1975 in Logic and Conversation.
Paul Grice noticed that people sometimes imply their ideas through daily conversations when they say something rather than expressing directly. Then in his studies, he said that our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would be rational if they did. When people start to imply something, his purpose or direction was definitely clear in his mind. In order to make sure that the listener understands his expressions, the speaker must make his conversational contribution as required and have the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which he is engaged. This principle is known as the Cooperative Principle, or CP for short.
It was easy to observe some unusual information through daily conversations that people sometimes answered others questions indirectly. Paul Grice took great interest in the way that conversations are carried out, especially how implied meanings are generated and understood. Then he made three major contributions: he distinguished non-natural sense from natural sense; he found the phenomenon of conversational implicature; he explained the nature of communication. (Feng, 2008:11; Grice, 1989; 214; Levinson,1983;97)