Cooperative Principle in English and Chinese Cultures

Cooperative principle is believed to play a regulative role in English-speaking communication and any real or apparent violations of the maxims of cooperative principle will lead to what we call "conversational implicature", but this is not the case in Chinese culture.Chinese language users only conform to the Maxim of Relevance of the cooperative principle in a broad sense.Cooperative principle is quite limited to explain the natural Chinese expressions.Five causes that account for this are discussed in this paper.