9 - Pragmatics: co-operation and politeness

Summary

This chapter extends pragmatics beyond speech act theory (conversational analysis) discussed in the last chapter, by considering two pragmatic theories which sprang from it: Paul Grice's co-operative principle (CP), and offshoots of it, and Geoffrey Leech's politeness principle (PP) or grand strategy of politeness. However, at the outset, we need to explain an important difference between these two principles and Searle's speech act theory.

Searle posited rules to preserve the conventional nature of communication: there would be an agreement between speaker and hearer that such and such a locution meeting such and such conditions should stand for a certain speech act, or what he called “essential conditions” (8.5.1). As we also noted (8.5.3), he claimed this conventionality could extend to indirect speech acts, so, for example, asking about the preparatory conditions for the speech act of request, the willingness or the ability of the hearer to perform the action, can count, by convention, as an indirect request. Grice's theory of communication, and Leech's complement to it, and Relevance Theory that sprang from it (Chapter 10), take a more radical view of communication. Conventions in the form of a code are seldom sufficient to convey a message, indeed, they may not even be necessary. Instead, communication is about a hearer, h, recognising the intention of a speaker, s, in uttering a locution, x. And although coding, the meaning of x, often plays a part, it may vary from the very explicit, such as in a legal document, to the very inexplicit, such as in a poem or in casual conversation. Or, as noted, the pragmatics of communication is about what s means by uttering x rather than simply what x means. To guide this process, rather than positing “rules”, which are either observed or broken, Grice and Leech try to discover principles, which are more like guidelines, which may be observed to varying degrees.