From the Floutings of the Cooperative Principle to Communicative Competence and to the Function of Context in Conversation It is for a long time that linguists have set great store by the effectiveness of linguistic communication through the oral channel ¡ª that is to say, our daily conversation. On account of the fact that these scholars regard linguistics, or to be more specific here, pragmatics, as a discipline stricter or more logical than any other one in social sciences or humanities, a strong impulse to generalize certain universal principles out of a huge variety of complex phenomena of our oral communication em