AN EXPLORATION ON LANGUAGE USERS’ PERSPECTIVES TOWARDS COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLES AND POLITENESS PRINCIPLES IN ENGLISH COMMUNICATION

Abstract

The current era has witnessed a rapid rate of globalization all over the world in various fields, such as economy, culture and society and other aspects. Thus, English language has become one of the key means of communication for many people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds. Accordingly, there is a growing demand for intercultural communication competence due to the differences in socio-cultural characteristics. The ultimate purpose of communication is to achieve communication goals in the most appropriate way. This paper aims to analyse the perspectives of English speakers towards cooperative principles and politeness principles in intercultural communication. Data were collected via surveys with non-native English speakers. The findings reveal that the participants are often unaware of the appropriateness of their language use in the other interlocutor’s culture, which might result in misunderstandings and impoliteness in communication. Furthermore, the communicative effectiveness is often taken for granted without proper attention to cooperative principles. In some cases, the participants sacrifice either cooperative or politeness principles to achieve the goal of communication. This study also proposes a number of techniques to maximize the effectiveness of cooperative principles and politeness principles in communication.