The Violation of Cooperative Principles and Four Maxims in Iranian Psychological Consultation

Arezou Sobhani, Ali Saghebi

Department of Linguistics, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
Department of Psychology, Shiraz Medical University, Shiraz, Iran.

DOI: 10.4236/ojml.2014.41009                

Abstract

This paper aimed to investigate new ways of understanding non-cooperative attitudes of the speakers and the violation of Cooperative Principle maxims in real Iranian psychological consulting session. The data base consists of recorded conversations between a male psychotherapist and his patients during therapy sessions. After analysing their language by means of conversational implicature and the occurrences of the violation of Cooperative Principle, it is concluded that the recognition of conversational implicature is essential for the understanding of the non-cooperative attitudes of the speakers and their violation of one or more Cooperative Principle maxims. Moreover, it was clear that the message people intend to convey is not wholly contained within the words they use, but it is also dependent on how hearers interpreting the message taking into account context and implicated meaning. Finally, there were instances when the purpose was to intentionally miscommunicate within this sophisticated social context. The study has a contribution to the existing knowledge in the area of pragmatics and psychology development.

Keywords

Cooperative Principle; Grice’s Maxims; Conversational Implicature; Flouting; Violation; Psychological Consultation

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

[1]	Darighgoftar, S., & Ghaffari, F. (2012). Different Homeopathic Characters Violate Cooperative Principles Differently. International Journal of Linguistics, 4, 266-280.
[2]	Davies, B. (2000). Grice’s Cooperative Principle: Getting the Meaning Across. Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics, 8, 126.
[3]	Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and Conversation. Syntax and Semantics, 3, 41-58.
[4]	Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
[5]	Hadi, A. (2013). A Critical Appraisal of Grice’s Cooperative Principle. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 3, 69-72. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojml.2013.31008
[6]	Horn, L. R., & Ward, G. L. (2004). The Handbook of Pragmatics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.
[7]	Jia, L. I. (2008). The Violation of Cooperative Principle and the Four Maxims in Psychological Consulting. Canadian Social Science, 4, 87-95.
[8]	Keenan, E. O. (1976). The Universality of Conversational Postulates. Language in Society, 5, 67-80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500006850
[9]	Ladegaard, H. J. (2009). Pragmatic Cooperation Revisited: Resistance and Non-Cooperation as a Discursive Strategy in Asymmetrical Discourses. Journal of Pragmatics, 41, 649-666. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2008.09.021
[10]	Larkin, D., & O’Malley, M. H. (1973). Declarative Sentences and the Rule-of-Conversation Hypothesis (pp. 306-319).
[11]	Leech, G. N. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. New York: Longman.
[12]	Mey, L. (2001). Pragmatics: An Introduction. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
[13]	Prince, E. (1982). Grice and Universality: A Reappraisal. Walnut St., PA: University of Pennsylvania. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~smalamud/grice.pdf
[14]	Robinson, B. (1989). The Cooperative Principle and Rationality. Grice, 22-40.
[15]	Sadock, B. J., Kaplan, H. I., & Sadock, V. A. (2007). Kaplan & Sadock’s Synopsis of Psychiatry: Behavioural Sciences/Clinical Psychiatry. Philadelphia: Wolter Kluwer/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
[16]	Sarangi, S. K., & Slembrouck, S. (1992). Non-Cooperation in Communication: A Reassessment of Gricean Pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics, 17, 117-154. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(92)90037-C
[17]	Taillard, M. O. (2004). Adaptive Persuasion. Working Papers in Linguistics. London: University College, 247-263.