The Study Of Conversational Implicature In Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband

Drama is an art of dialogues and acting. Drama dialogues have great value in linguistic study. They are not only an imitation of daily conversations but also an intelligent creation art. Grice's Theory of Conversational Implicature can be used to analyze drama dialogues and explore the meaning of the work itself and characters'utterance. Thus, it provided a strong tool for literature analysis.Conversational implicature is important in pragmatics. It is not until 1970s that American linguistic philosopher Paul Grice publicly proposed his theory of Conversational Implicature. The theory of conversational implicature studies speaker's utterance meaning, which can not be explained by semantics but pragmatic inference. Grice holds that the cooperative principle is an overall principle of communication. It contains four maxims, that is, quantity maxim, quality maxim, relation maxim and manner maxim. These four conversational maxims are used to describe how people observing or violating the cooperative principle. He also suggested a model to describe the inference of conversational implicature.Grice's theory of Conversational Implicature is employed in this thesis to analyze the conversations in Oscar Wilde's social comedy An Ideal Husband. The conversational implicature of this play is divided into four groups, according to which conversational maxims is flouted. After analyzing conversations between main characters, the thesis reached following conclusion: play writers create conversational implicatures by violating conversational maxims. These implicatures are used to display dramatic conflicts and characters'psychological movement. Readers have to explore characters'conversational implicatures to understand the meaning of characters or drama itself. In this play, the real ideal husband is not Sir Chiltern but Lord Goring, who apparently leads an idle life. The colourful language employed in this play created a unique characteration of ideal husband and criticized the hypocrisy of London society. Using conversational implicatures, the writer created unique dramatic conflicts and displayed his implicature.