Explorations of the complementarity of pragmatic principles in Shoneyin’s the secret lives of Baba Segi’s wives

Abstract

Communication is a goal-oriented phenomenon which requires that participants make conscious choices that best convey their illocutionary goals and yield the desired utterance meaning. These choices often bring the pragmatic principles into conflict with each other. The paper examines the complementary interplay of the Gricean Cooperative Principle (CP) and Leech’s Politeness Principle (PP) in the advancement of discourse goals. It reveals that the CP and the PP conflict with each other in utterances, leaving the speaker a choice to sacrifice one in favour of the other. This engenders a maxim “trade-off” relationship inter-principle and intra-principle. The choice of maxim precedence observed in the text is conditioned by the socio-cultural contexts of the communicators and the illocutionary goals of the utterances. The analyses show that neither the CP nor the PP is unilaterally adequate in all talk exchanges, but the two complement each other’s social function. As both interact in the interpretation of indirectness, the use of an indirect speech act to preserve the PP often induces implicature failure on the part of the hearer.