A Pragmatic Analysis of the Impact of Cooperative Principle on Outpatient Discourse

Based on the framework of the Cooperative Principle, the qualitative research method was adopted to analyze the compliance and violation of the Cooperation Principle between doctors and patients in the outpatient departments. The research object of this thesis is the dialogue between doctors and patients in outpatient departments of Chinese hospitals. The corpus of this study was collected by the author in four outpatient departments of a Grade A hospital in Shenzhen in 2019. In this thesis, 20 cases of doctor-patient dialogues were randomly selected from 83 cases of recorded corpus according to proportion of each department, and the following conclusions were drawn: 1) When answering the doctor’s question, most patients violate the Maxim of Quantity. 2) Many patients often violate the Maxim of Relevance. 3) Both doctors and patients often comply with the Maxim of Manner. 4) Most doctors often comply with the Maxim of Quality and violate the Maxim of Relevance. This thesis purposes the existing problems in Chinese outpatient conversation, and provides guidance for the doctor-patient communication in the future.