Pragmatic Analysis Of Xue Baochai's And Lin Daiyu's Utterances In A Dream Of Red Mansions

A Dream of Red Mansions is a great classical novel written by Cao Xueqin in the mid-eighteenth century which describes the prosperity and decline of a big family. This novel has a profound ideological content and progressive political tendency. Its significance makes it not only be regarded as one of the greatest classical novels in our country but also possess a position of prestige in the history of world literature. The vivid delicate descriptions of scene, folklore, poems, drinkers'wager game and especially the characters'utterances are so attractive that people always want to read it. With the appearance of English version, more and more scholars pay close attention to this novel, but they often analyze it from the perspective of translation or cultural appreciation. Only a few study the character utterances from the perspective of pragmatics. What's more, Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai are the main characters in the novel who love Jia Baoyu. They are both beautiful and clever, so they are usually regarded as one unity according to some scholars. However, the differences between Lin Daiyu's and Xue Baochai's personalities are so distinctive that the thesis intends to study their utterances in A Dream of Red Mansions from the perspective of pragmatics to see how Cao Xueqin portrayed these two typical main characters through their words.In 1967, H. P. Grice proposed the theory of Conversational Implicature and Cooperative Principle (CP). Conversational Implicature is thought to be one of the most important theories in pragmatics. There are four maxims in CP, but these maxims are not always observed. People will violate some of these principles to convey their implied meanings. This theory explains how conversational implicature is conducted, but it doesn't give the reasons why people convey what they mean indirectly. However, the Politeness Principle (PP) of Geoffrey Leech and Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory can well explain why people convey their meanings in an indirect way.So this thesis first introduces the theory of Conversational Implicature, Grice's Cooperative Principle and the studies on Politeness both home and abroad, and then the thesis tries to analyze the typical utterances of Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai on various occasions on the bases of these theories, original version of Cao Xueqin and English version of Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. The two characters'personalities will be analyzed from their choices of pragmatic strategies during the conversation, which helps to study this classical novel in a new field.From all the elaboration and analysis, it can be seen that pragmatics plays an important part in analyzing dialogues in the novel. It is concluded that although this pragmatic approach is not the only way to analyze character utterances and study the works, it still has its unique place, to be more specific, the theory of Conversational Implicature, the Cooperative Principle as well as Politeness Principle play important roles in the process.It is also hoped that the pragmatic approach to A Dream of Red Mansions may help shed some light on the pragmatic analysis and appreciation of other classical novels.