Compliments are used to pass the good feelings, which are those words that expressing praise, appreciation, admiration and so on. Compliment is a common language phenomenon, which can not only shorten the distance between communicators, but also keep in touch with friends and maintain normal social relationships. The discourse structure of compliment is a “adjacency pair”, Compliments and responses must co-occurrence, which means the people must respond to compliment: to accept or reject.
In this paper, I will use Friends as a prototype to study the application of the cooperative principle in the compliments and responses. The paper is composed of five parts.
The first part is an introduction which includes background information, the purpose, the structure and significance of this study.
The second part offers an overview of the previous study on CP and its present situation.
The third part gives detailed principles of CP.
The fourth part is the applications of CP in the compliments and responses in Friends.
The fifth part is conclusion that contains the major findings.
The main methods of this paper are based on the analysis of the popular American humor comedy Friends . The data I chose for the case study is by watching the comedy personally and studying its scripts.
Ⅱ. A Historical Retrospection of CP
Since it was proposed by Herbert Paul Grice in his Logic and Conversation in 1967, it has opened a new area for the development of linguistic. It is a important part of linguistic research, and also a focus of the logics. This is mainly embodied in the research of time, results, range and so on. With the linguistic research growing more, CP also aroused people’s enthusiasm, so cooperative principle has got people’s attention from home and abroad. China is no exception, there are lots of people who ever studied it, for example, Hu Zhuanglin, He Zhaoxiong and so on. But CP also has defects , so now people are trying to make it perfect by improving, complementing and negating. 从《老友记》看合作原则在称赞语及回应中的应用(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_33676.html