Pragmatic Differences between Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle in Chinese and English Commentators’ Utterances

From the perspective of pragmatics, this paper makes a comparative study on utterances from Chinese commentators and English commentators, through four groups of Chinese-English real authentic corpus in the same e-sports competition. Results show that Chinese commentators attach great importance to harmony and indirect euphemism, so they would take priority on Politeness Principle. Whereas English commentators tend to be more straightforward, so they pay more attention to the Cooperative Principle. According to existing researches, due to the differences between Chinese and western cultures, Chinese and western native speakers have different thinking modes, which makes them have different tendency in observing the Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle in communication.

Keywords: Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, commentators’ utterances, cultural differences