会话原则下的文化因素(4)

Since people should follow the Cooperative Principle in conversation, then why do they violate it? Why do not they state their views frankly, but let their listeners recognize the communicated meanings via inference? G. Leech has proposed the Politeness Principle to rescue the Cooperative Principle. In his point of view, the reason why people violate the Cooperative Principle is out of the consideration of politeness. So the more people know about the Politeness Principle, the better they understand conversational implicatures.

Before talking about the Politeness Principle, the Face Theory should be introduced. As a technical term, face means the public self-image of a person. It refers too that emotional and social sense of self that everyone has and expects everyone else to recognize. That is to say, people have the need to be connected, which is called positive face, and the need to be independent, which is called negative face. In order to keep the listener’s positive face, the speaker should fall in with his listener’s wishes; at the same time, his own negative face is threatened. Also, in order to keep the listener’s negative face, the speaker should apologize, belittle himself and talk ambiguously, while his own positive face is threatened simultaneously. So people’ conversational activities are actually face threatening acts. In order to keep his listener’s face as well as his, the best way for the speaker to do is to be polite.

Politeness, in an interaction, refers to the means employed to show awareness of another person’s face. In Leech’s Politeness Principle, there are six means or maxims as follows: tact maxim, generosity maxim, approbation maxim, modesty maxim, and agreement maxim and sympathy maxim. In 2.1 Shen Jian had to determine, as he spoke, the relative social distance between him and the emperor and hence the emperor’s “face wants”, which refers to a person’s expectations that their public self-image will be respected. The emperor is supreme and Shen Jian successfully applied the tact maxim. Lu Xun also applied the Politeness Principle in example 4.1.

To draw pragmatic implications from the violation of the Cooperative Principle is of no difference between the west and the east. What is a different lie in people’s choice of the maxims of the Cooperative Principle. For example:

1. A: You dance well.       

B: I’m glad to hear that.

2. An English teacher is praising a Chinese girl’s calligraphy, “Oh, what beautiful handwriting!” But the girl replied, “No, no, not at all.” “You’re joking.” The English teacher became angry and went away.

Here, neither B’s reply is immodest nor the Chinese girl’s remark is insincere. The reason why the English teacher became angry and went away is that the girl has made a great mistake—she unintentionally makes the foreign teacher feel being mocked. Such kind of mistake is called “pragmatic failure”, that is to say, the inability to understand what is meant by what is said. By culture, we mean "a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that the member of a society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning"(Bates,   28). Generally speaking, Chinese pay more attention to the Politeness Principle while the westerners lay more emphasis on the Cooperative Principle, and Chinese-styled politeness is characterized by four aspects: respectfulness, modesty, attitudinal warmth and refinement.

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