A Pragmatic Analysis Of The Dialogues In Jane Eyre

Criticisms and reviews on Jane Eyre, the world classic of the well known British woman writer Charlotte Bronte have been numerous in number and various in approaches. This paper, as an interdisciplinary study of linguistics and literature, intends to analyze in detail the conversational exchanges between the hero and the heroine of the novel from the perspective of pragmatics.After reviewing the pragmatic studies of literature, especially those of fictional prose both at home and abroad, the thesis introduces the pragmatic theories and principles as well as such rhetorical devices as metaphor, overstatement and repetition to be used in the subsequent analysis. The cooperative principle or CP put forward by Paul Grice the philosopher and logician, the politeness principle or PP of Geoffrey Leech and Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, as well as Austin's and Searle's widely used speech act theory are expounded. Grice's cooperative principle and the related maxims help account for the relation between "sense" and "force" and explain how conversational implicature is produced and interpreted while Leech's politeness principle and its concomitant maxims are conductive to explicating why people more often than not violate the conversational maxims and convey what they really mean indirectly in a communicative exchange.Ever since its publication in 1847, Jane Eyre has been the focus of literary criticism. Thus in Chapter Three, the criticisms and reviews on Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre are surveyed with stress on the existent subject matters and approaches before the necessity and feasibility of the pragmatic perspective is discussed. The main body of the thesis is the elaboration of the case analysis in which the abovementioned pragmatic theories and principles are employed together with those rhetorical devices to analyze extracts of dialogues between the hero and the heroine of Jane Eyre. It is also in this chapter that changes in the way Jane and Rochester address each other which reflect changes in their relations are touched upon. This thesis aims to analyze the dialogues and the conversational implicature in detail from the perspective of pragmatics in the hope of making out how they help push the story ahead, draw pictures of the characters and reveal their inner world.It is hoped that the pragmatic approach to Jane Eyre in the present study may contribute to a better and fuller understanding of this world classic and help shed some light on the usefulness of the pragmatic approach to the interpretation of prose fiction in general.