A Study On Violation Of Cooperative Principle In Film Dialogues

According to Grice's Conversational Implicature Theory, the Cooperative Principle is the premise and guarantee for a successful conversation. It demands people's observance to its sub-maxims to reach their personal or social goals in the process of communication in which dialogues are adopted as the main means. However, for some reason, Cooperative Principle (CP) is violated. The violation of CP usually creates certain implicated meanings which are used as an indirect way to indicate a speaker's intention. Films, as the manifest of real life, have their characters violate such maxims. Furthermore, the linguistic features of film dialogues make the conversational implicature on the ground of violation of CP to be the primary method of carrying on characters'communication, of unfolding people's inside world and of conveying films'deeper significations.Previous studies mainly focused on the translation of film dialogues from literary, sociological or translating points of view, while the studies from linguistic, especially pragmatic angle were rather limited. This thesis takes advantage of conversational implicature theory in pragmatics to analyze the Violation of Grice's Cooperative Principle in film dialogues. And it collects and coordinates a great deal of original movie scripts and places those dialogues in their concrete context where they took place in order to find out how the maxims are violated and the conversational implicatures accompany with such inobservance. In the process of demonstrate there are, for each sub-maxim, theoretic quotations as well as enough and felicitous examples directly taken from different movies to illustrate or support the argumentation. Through analysis, the features of violation of CP and the sequence of breaching various sub-maxims in film dialogues are detected.It is sincerely hoped that the analysis in this thesis will be of some assistance for better understanding of original English movies as well as in the studying fieldwork of conversational implicature, especially in Cooperative Principle.