3.1 Conversational Implicature Made by Violating the Quantity Maxim 7

3.2 Conversational Implicature Made by Violating the Quality Maxim 9

3.3 Conversational Implicature Made by Violating the Relation Maxim 11

3.4 Conversational Implicature Made by Violating the Manner Maxim 13

4 Conclusion 15

References 17

An Analysis on Conversational Implicature in Modern Family from the Perspective of Cooperative Principle

1 Introduction

1.1 Research Background

CP (Cooperative Principle) was proposed by H. P. Grice in 1967 when he made a speech named Logic and Conversation. According to Grice (1967), people have to follow some rules when talking. Communication requires cooperation. But people may violate one or several maxims to convey their implications beyond literal meaning. Grice called the situation a flouting of the rules. Grice defined the indirect meaning contained in the discourses “Conversational Implicature”. Conversational implicature is focused on what the speaker mean by saying the words instead of what they said. In recent years, many scholars use Grice’s theory to analyze the dialogues in daily life, novels, and dramas and so on in order to explain how the conversational implicature generated.

Nowadays, all kinds of situation comedy play an important role in people’s daily entertainment life by its unique artistic charm. Modern Family is a series of situation comedy in the form of Mockumentary. It first appeared on the ABC in 2009 and has been widely praised after its premiere because of its fresh theme. The comedy recorded three typical American families’ life. It describes their complex and chaotic daily life and emotion world in a unique perspective.

1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study

Modern Family has received much attention since its premiere in 2009. Take the dialogues in Modern Family (season 7) as the object of the research can promote the combination of pragmatics and the hottest topics in today’s society. People can enjoy the charm of pragmatics from many aspects of fast-paced society. The paper tends to help people use Cooperative Principle better and establish a good interpersonal relationship in daily life. Furthermore, readers can be more familiar with the situation comedy after reading this paper. Cooperative Principle can be widely applied to the analysis of dialogues.

The main purpose of this paper is to try to analyze the dialogues in Modern Family from the perspective of Cooperative Principle to discuss how the conversational implicature generated. The author hopes to attract more scholars to analyze situation comedy from other angles. What’s more, this research hopes to be helpful to improve people’s ability to communicate with others through the analysis of the application of the Cooperation Principle.

1.3 Layout of the Paper

This paper is pided into four sections. Section one is a brief introduction of the paper, in this part the author mainly introduces Grice’s theory—Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature, and then gives an overall view of the research object of the paper—Modern Family. Section two provides a literature review of Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature and the previous studies on Cooperative Principle at home and abroad. The introduction of situation comedy is also included. Section three is the major part of the paper. The author selects twelve examples from Modern Family (season 7) as the research object. The emphasis of this part is to analyze how the Conversational Implicature is produced by violating Cooperative Principle. The last part is the conclusion of the paper. It summarizes the author’s findings of the research.