Priority of the Politeness Principle over the Cooperative Principle in Communication

摘要

The Cooperative Principle that Grice proposes explains how conversational implicature is generated but it does not tell us why people are often inclined to convey what they want to say indirectly and implicitly by violating the maxims of the Cooperative Principle. Leech introduces the Politeness Principle to provide a reasonable explanation for this question, that is, for politeness. From the perspective of the purpose of communication, this article tries to argue that the Politeness Principle has the greater binding force in conversation and it should be given priority over the Cooperative Principle.