I enjoy the reading for this week because I think the content of this chapter is reachable to our daily conversation. Speech acts we offer such as an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal occur to our daily live. There are four cooperative principles to be considered in the chapter, and they are maxims of quantity, relevance, manner, and quality. Too much or less information, irrelevant or unrelated, miscellaneous or chaotic, or untruthful utterance will illustrate a violation of the maxims of the cooperative principle. Ironically, speakers sometimes are forced to violate a maxim due to their cultural norms, for example, being polite. People who are invited to someone's house for dinner may feel constrained to say compliments on the dinner if they think the foods are not their taste. It would be impossible to tell the truth. So indirect speech acts may result.
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Oooh, white lies. That's an interesting linguistic phenomenon! :)
ReplyDeletewhite lies violate the maxium of the conversation quality
ReplyDeleteExcept that I think socially, many people value white lies and would prefer to hear them than the truth. Like if someone asked "Do you like my new hat?" and I actually hated the hat, I would be violating a different kind of politeness norm if I said so. The person with the hat would probably not mind me violating the quality maxim if I said, "Wow, it's quite striking" instead of "No, it's ugly".
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