Analysis on The Good Doctor Season 1 from the Perspective of Cooperative Principle

Abstract

In 1967, the American language philosopher Grice proposed the cooperative principle, which provided a new theoretical framework for conversation analysis. In the following decades, the cooperative principle has been a trending topic of discussion in linguistics and continuously developed. Leech’s politeness principle and Wilson and Sperber’s relative theory have improved the cooperation principle from different aspects. The cooperative principle has been widely applied in the analysis of conversations in films, dramas, and literature, which contributes to a holistic understanding of characterization and dramatic conflicts. In this paper, doctor-patient dialogues in The Good Doctor Season 1 are analyzed from the theoretical perspective of the cooperative principle. It can be discerned that healthcare workers should comply with the maxim of quality and quantity, to no little extent, when communicating with patients. However, in different contexts, healthcare workers sometimes choose to deliberately violate the maxim of relation and manner in order to achieve better communication effects, such as helping patients understand their conditions or relieving patients’ tension. This paper intends to provide effective suggestions for real-life doctor-patient communication by applying the cooperative principle to the corpus analysis in The Good Doctor Season 1, so as to improve the communication efficiency of both parties and create a harmonious doctor-patient relationship.