As is known to all, Conversational Implicature Theory is used widely as one of the classical subjects of pragmatics. Conversational Implicature Theory has aroused wide attention of scholars who intere
As is known to all, Conversational Implicature Theory is used widely as one of the classical subjects of pragmatics. Conversational Implicature Theory has aroused wide attention of scholars who interested in pragmatics at home and abroad. They wrote in succession and made a mutual response with a lot of effective interpretation and reconstruction of the theory, and they also had a selection of its correct, made up for its deficiency. Which is the so-called “stand on the shoulders of giants to see farther,” Such as Leech, who proposed “Polite Principle”(Principles of Pragmatics,1983.) to “remedy” the Cooperative Principle. Although Leech's “Polite Principle” has been made up for the lack of “Cooperative Principle” to some extent, but there are still many defects in the classical theory. Based on these, Sperber and Wilson put forward the conception of “Relevance theory” (Communication and Cognition,1986) which can get together the four maxims of Grice’s Cooperative Principle. Although relevance theory is important to the study of conversational communication and human cognitive activity, but many linguistics do not agree with the opinion that to unify four maxims of Grice with “Relevance Theory”. Horn and Levinson played an important role in improving and perfecting the theory, Levenson said they summed up the idea that they made a new interpretation for the classical Grice, and at the same time he concluded the pragmatic inference model, its called the ‘New Grice pragmatic mechanism’. (1991) Since then, people began to called the Grice’s Cooperative Principle of the four maxims as the classical conversational implicature, various corrections made to Grice’s theory of Conversational Implicature considered as the new Grice’s theory of Conversational Implicature. These theories made up for the deficiency of classical theory. On the basis of summarizing the deficiency of classical theory, many scholars at home also made their own research, Xu Shenghuan proposed his pragmatic inference mechanism, which played an important role in the development of Conversational Implicature Theory. Different researches has opened up a broad road for the new Gric’s theory of Conversational Implicature.