Pragmatic cooperation revisited: Resistance and non-cooperation as a discursive strategy in asymmetrical discourses

It is widely assumed in the pragmatics literature that human communication is rational and logical. It is commonly described as a cooperative endeavour where speakers are oriented towards a common purpose or goal, which is to make the interaction succeed, even though this may sometimes appear not to be the case. This article offers a critical discussion of Gricean cooperation. It analyses examples of student-teacher dialogues which show that non-cooperation and non-accommodation may be employed as the preferred discourse strategy, and that the aim of communication may be to miscommunicate rather than to communicate successfully. It is suggested that 'meaning' in language only makes sense in the light of the social and psychological conditions under which language is produced, and that the notion of cooperation should be analyzed in terms of what people want to obtain by their communication. Communication accommodation theory and the notion of resistance are proposed as more appropriate explanatory frameworks to achieve this end.