A Pragmatic Study And Analysis Of Character Utterances In Fortress Besieged

Although literary works are imaginary, they are based on careful observations of the real world. The fictional world is an imitation of the real world. So there is a strong similarity between them. The character utterances in fiction may be artificial in reality, but they are true in fiction. Therefore, pragmatic theories also have validity for literary interaction in theory. This thesis tries to explore the rich implicatures and literary functions of character utterances in Fortress Besieged from the perspective of pragmatics so as to confirm pragmatic theories'validity for the analysis of Fortress Besieged and other literary works.Being a classic in modern Chinese literature, Fortress Besieged is acclaimed as"New'The Scholars'". It has won the favor of readers both from home and abroad by right of its abundant content, profound significance as well as unique writing techniques. The novel successfully builds a vivid image of a group of mentally sick intellectuals. For some reason, the characters sometimes deliberately express themselves in an implicit way, which adds to the readability of the novel. The language using in Fortress Besieged is regarded as a good example in the history of Chinese literature. But it's a great pity that although many people have studied character utterances in the novel, few did it from the perspective of pragmatics except one article appeared on Guangxi Social Science concerning the illocutionary meaning of character utterances in Fortress Besieged. No systematic work has been found in this aspect. How is the implied meaning or illocutionary meaning produced and interpreted? Why do the characters adopt the indirect way? What are the literary functions of these implicatures?This thesis aims to answer the three questions mentioned above by employing pragmatic theories. To be specific, the thesis makes use of Grice's conversational implicature, Leech's politeness principle and banter principle as well as Brown and Levinson's face theory and off-record politeness to analyze the artistry of character utterances in Fortress Besieged in order to capture the conversational implicaures better and elaborate the functions of these implicaures so as to clarify the feasibility of applying pragmatics into the analysis of Fortress Besieged. Conducting the study from the angle of pragmatics, this thesis obviously breaks the traditional model of merely using literary theories to appreciate and study Fortress Besieged, thus supplies a new horizon for the research into the novel. Besides, this tentative study on the implicatures and multi-functions of the character utterances in Fortress Besieged may also serve as an inspiration for literary translation since it makes translators aware and reminds them of the importance of reproduction of the rich implicatures and multi-functions hidden in character utterances in the process of translation. It's believed that with the everlasting enchantment of Fortress Besieged and the development of pragmatics, more and more researches into it and its translation will be done in a pragmatic way.