Analysis Of Conversational Implicature In Pride And Prejudice From The Perspectives Of The Cooperative Principle And The Politeness Theory

This thesis is a detailed analysis of the conversational implicature in Pride and Prejudice from the perspectives of the Cooperative Principle (CP) and the politeness theory. The criticisms and reviews on Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice are surveyed with the emphasis on the existent subject matters and approaches. And the discussion of the conversational implicature from the pragmatic approach is thus introduced. Grice's CP and conversational maxims, Brown and Levinson's concept of face and off-record politeness strategies and Leech's Politeness Principle (PP) and maxims are carefully reviewed. The implicature interpretation is touched upon as well. The CP and the related maxims explain how the conversational implicature is produced and interpreted and the relation between "sense and force". The PP accounts for the reason why people often violate the conversational maxims and employ indirectness in conveying what they really mean in the conversational interaction. The off-record strategies illustrate different linguistic realizations of utterances which invite conversational implicature and do the face-threatening-act (FTA) implicitly. These three pragmatic theories are combined to serve as the theoretical framework to facilitate the conversational analysis in Pride and Prejudice. The main body of the thesis is the elaboration of the conversational implicature produced by the selected examples from Pride and Prejudice. The illustrations are classified into different categories in accordance with the linguistic realization types of the off-record strategies and made a comparative analysis. The irony principle is paid special attention to. The characters infringe certain conversational maxims and generate implicatures by means of off-record strategies. The FTA is done indirectly and therefore the PP is maintained at the expense of the CP. Meanwhile in this way they try to reach their conversational goals. This inferring process is elaborated and the risk and advantage of off-record strategies are likewise dealt with. By exploring the conversational implicature from the approach of pragmatics in Pride and Prejudice, this thesis in one way manifests Jane Austen's realism, which reaffirms and enriches the conventional Austen criticism, and claries the validity of taking pragmatic theory into literature criticism.