This article focuses on institutional discourse pragmatics, highlighting its salient features in a business to customer negotiation model, based on an authentic business correspondence (email), through a prism of H. Grice’s Theory of Cooperative Principle. The central thrust of this theory is the application of the maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner to speech acts to secure identification of participants’ intentions and sentence meaning, excluding irrelevancies throughout the communication process. Any kind of interaction in our life is accompanied by diverse tangible and intangible components. The role, function and impact of these aggregate components on the natural flow of communication irrespective of the form (oral/written) are the concern of pragmatics.
An Application of Grice’s Cooperative Principle to the Analysis of a Written Business Negotiation Model
