Analysis to the Violation of Cooperative Principles in Daily Conversation and the Production of Humor

Abstract

Humor is the flash of one’s knowledge, talent, wisdom, and inspiration in language expression as well as the ability to grasp “funny or witty imagination.”.Humorous language, like a lubricant, can effectively reduce the “coefficient of friction” between people. The principle of Cooperation was put forward by Grice, a famous American language philosopher, in a speech at Harvard University in 1967. Grice believes that in the process of people’s communication, the two sides of the dialogue seem to follow a certain principle intentionally or unintentionally in order to complete the communicative task effectively. To make the communication activities go smoothly, the communicative parties always follow the cooperative principle in the process of language communication; But sometimes, in order to achieve some kind of communicative purpose, people usually break the cooperative principles and then complete the conversation in a humorous way. This paper will analyze how daily conversation can achieve humor by violating the cooperative principle. Furthermore, it is proved that the violation of the four maxims has a strong explanatory power to the emergence of humorous language.