Chapter One　Cooperative Principle in Male-Female Relationship in Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is about how the heroine Elizabeth Bennet and the hero Fitzwilliam Darcy overcome various obstacles resulting from their own defects and other people's interference to find their true love and get married. This novel is one of Austen's favorite works and is not only appreciated by its reader, but by today's television and films, and it is well-known as “l(fā)ight & bright and sparkling” by Jane Austen herself (Todd, 2008: 26). Austen thinks the novel is so bright that it may need some shade. It is a novel about love and also about the exploration of male and female relationship in marriage and out of marriage. There is a big cast, including four pairs of married couple, ten unmarried ladies and four unmarried gentlemen. If the men in the army are all counted, there will be a larger number. In the novel, Jane Austen demonstrates various relationships between males and females, such as Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Elizabeth and Mr. Collins, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, and Jane and Mr. Bingley. Some relationships are based on money and wealth, while others are related to virtues and morals. Austen's greatness lies in her acceptance of the disharmonious male-female relationship as a kind of reality and her pursuit for an equal and harmonious one. She doesn't hate the inequality or disharmony, accepting them as human need for existence and as a foil to the harmonious relationship based on understanding and self-discipline. In the representation of different male-female relationships, Austen employs a lot of truthful and apt conversations to depict her characters who are like real people in the world, obeying the social rules of speech or violating them on different grounds.

Social rules of speeches are of great interest to linguistics, among whom the famous British educated linguist and philosopher Paul Grice studies daily conversations and proposes the cooperative principle (Grice, 2002). This principle is based on the assumption that speech is act, namely language can do things. Linguists claim that people say something in order to do something else, which means the pragmatic analysis of language can be broadly understood to be the investigation into the aspect of meaning which is derived not from the formal properties of words and construction, but from the way in which utterances are used and how they relate to the context in which they are uttered (Leech, 2001). When people say something, they aim to perform three acts simultaneously, locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. Locutionary act refers to the speaking of the exact words or the literal meaning of one's speech. Illocutionary act is the purpose of the speaking, such as asking, requesting, declaring, commanding, promising, warning, and so on. Perlocutionary act means the effect of the speaking on the listener, who may either satisfy or dissatisfy the speaker's intention. Since speech is used to do things, Grice proposed the famous cooperative principle which is shortened as CP and its maxims in his paper Logic and Conversation, in which he suggests that in daily communication, people must be cooperative if they want to keep smooth and harmonious relationship. The requirement is to make one's conversational contribution such as is required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which one is engaged (Cole & Morgan, 1975). In Grice's opinion, there are a set of assumptions that guide the process of conversation, and they can be regarded as some guidelines followed by people in efficient conversation. To better illustrate these assumptions, he proposes the four maxims, namely the maxim of quantity, the maxim of quality, the maxim of relation, and the maxim of manner. In a word, these maxims specify what people have to do in order to lead the conversation in a cooperative and effective way. They should make sure that the information provided in the conversation be informative, true, relevant and clear.

This chapter is devoted to the application of the cooperative principle to the analysis of conversations in male-female relationship in Pride and Prejudice. The prominence of dialogues in the novel is quite obvious, “with the opening two sentences of witty judgment of marriage being followed immediately by the lively dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. And almost three fourths of the novel is composed of conversations” (Gill & Gregory, 2003: 5). As the analysis of conversations in daily communication, the principle can be used to interpret how Austen's command of conversations and speech rules function to demonstrate various male-female relationships in the novel. This chapter consists of two parts. The first part examines how the application of the cooperative principle contributes to the depiction of the characters and the enlightenment of the harmony between men and women. The second part focuses on how the violation of the cooperative principle reveals the disharmony in male-female relationship in the novel.