Pragmatic Analysis On The Presuppositions And Conversational Implicatures In Pride And Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice is one of Jane Austen's masterpieces. This thesis intends to analyze presuppositions and conversational implicature in the dialogues in Pride and Prejudice to know how the characters in this novel achieve their communicative aims through their dialogues.Most of the dialogues in the novel Pride and Prejudice are life dialogues. The dialogues are held between people of different relationships such as the dialogues between husband and wife, aristocrats and civilians, etc.This thesis intends to analyze the dialogues in this novel from the perspective of presupposition and implicature. The notion of presupposition was first put forward in Frege's works on the nature of reference and referring expressions. Presupposition is considered as a precondition for a sentence to have truth-value. Presuppositions are generally associated with specific lexical items or grammatical expressions in the utterances. The lexical items or grammatical expressions that trigger presuppositions are presupposition triggers. Implicature is a proposition that is implied in the utterance even though that proposition is not a part of what was actually said. Utterance always has two layers of meaning, explicit meaning and implicature. Some speakers don't really express their intentions directly and clearly and the addressees have to infer the implicature that the speakers really want to convey through pragmatic inference.The characters in this novel achieve their conversational aims through their utterances. The characters in the novel generate abundant pragmatic meanings through observing or flouting conversational maxims in the process of communication and conversation, endowing different speech act characteristics to roles, depicting the characters' vivid personalities, forming the language style of poignancy, satire, tact and humor in the novel. We know how the characters achieve their conversational aims through analyzing the presuppositions and conversational implicatures in the dialogues uttered by the characters in the novel Pride and Prejudice.Elizabeth is the protagonist in this novel; she has a sharp tongue. At first, she hasprejudice against Darcy and she always satires Darcy's pride. Darcy is proud and he has the opinion of class difference. He always looks down upon the people he thinks inferior to him. So his utterance always reflects pride. Miss Bennet is eager to see her daughters married. She wants her daughters to marry wealthy family with good background. She always flatter people superior than her. Mr. Collins always flatters people who he thinks superior than him. He is a snobbish man. The diabgues uttered by the characters always reflect the characters' personalities. Some characters achieve their conversational effects through irony and sarcasm.Finally, through analyzing presuppositions and conversational implicatures in the dialogues in this novel, we know how the characters express their real conversational meanings and realize their communicative alms through their utterances.