Analysis Of The Fictional Dialogues In Pride And Prejudice From The Perspective Of Conversational Implicature Theory

The fictional dialogues in novels play a vital important role in demonstrating the speech acts and the characters of the roles. A literature work can be called classic and last long enough but still as new as it was created is due to the generations of the readers who are deeply attracted by the distinctive speech acts and the vivid characters of the roles. The English female writer Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice belongs to this kind. The roles in this novel achieve mutual communicative aims through their dialogues. So it is necessary to study the fictional dialogues in this novel.From the countless literature criticisms and researches, we can see the literature value of Pride and Prejudice. However from the perspective of pragmatics to analyze this novel is not often seen. This thesis intends to analyze the implied meaning of the fictional dialogues in this classic novel by Grice's Conversational Implicature Theory. Through pragmatic inference this thesis can not only deduce the different characters of the roles in the novel and the language style of the author but also provide a new research approach for literature works.Jane Austen's language is witty, humorous and full of irony. Her unique language style is reflected by the numerous fictional dialogues in the novel. The characters in this novel generate abundant pragmatic meaning through observing or flouting conversational maxims in the process of communication. During the deductive process, the personalities of the roles and the style of the writer can be clearly shown in front of the readers. The pragmatic theory applied in this thesis is Grice (an English language philosopher)'s Conversational Implicature Theory. This theory can reveal the implicature through pragmatic inference which makes the readers could understand the implied meaning of the speakers which they don't really express their intentions directly and clearly. This thesis also gives a detailed description of Grice's CP (Cooperative Principle) Theory for the generation of implicature is derived from the violation of CP.The application of the Conversational Implicature Theory into the analysis of the fictional dialogues in Pride and Prejudice leads to the conclusions: on one hand we can get a better understanding of the vivid characters of the roles and appreciation of the style of the writer through the process of pragmatic inference; on the other hand this approach can prove the validity and significance of taking pragmatic theory into literature works.