GP and NCP

Abstract

AbstractDespite its theoretical significance, Paul Grice’s CP, as the heart of classic and neo-Gricean pragmatics, has been a bone of contention for the last four decades for both Western and Eastern scholarship. This study addresses the contribution of four Chinese pragmaticians to the anti-CP principles: Guanlian Qian, Meizhen Liao, and Yameng Liu and Chunshen Zhu, focusing on the latter two. We briefly discuss Liao’s Goal Principle (GP) and Liu and Zhu’s Non-Cooperative Principle (NCP), which challenge Grice’s CP head-on. It points out that Liao’s GP is loaded with neo-Gricean pragmatic value as an alternative interpretation of CP but is not deemed “more applicable” as they claim, and that the NCP of Liu and Zhu, based on their CP query, sheds some light on neo-Gricean pragmatics and rhetoric, and yet calls for suspicion of their NCP as an “antistrophos/counterpart rhetoric-principle.” We maintain that cooperation in CP suggests pragma-philosophical cooperativeness or cooperationality between rational humans and that it applies to pragmatics and rhetoric alike, as well as to forensic, daily, and rhetorical utterances. It seems that so-called “non-cooperation in cooperation” or “cooperation in non-cooperation” is only logico-semantic non-cooperation, deeply rooted in the soil of pragma-philosophical cooperativeness or cooperationality.