Analysis Of Dialogues In Tess Of The D’Urbervilles In The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

As a newly developed independent subject of Linguistics, Pragmatics mainly studies the special utterances in special circumstances, especially how to understand and use language in different linguistic communicative surroundings. Nowadays most of the studies in Pragmatics are concerning about Cooperative Principle of linguistic philosopher Grice’s.Tess of the D’Urbervilles was one of the two most famous novels written by Hardy. Set in the background of Capitalist Society of Britain towards the end of19th century, Hardy employs multitudes of dialogues by different identities so as to disclose the false morality of capitalism and tackle the tragic process caused by capitalism that finally led to the dying out of British farmer class. Such a great work is well fit for the use of Cooperative Principle in understanding and analyzing its rich dialogues against the specific historic setting.Taking most of the dialogues in Tess of the D’Urbervilles as examples and specially choosing the paragraph-order, this article will analyze the dialogues according to the four maxims of Cooperative Principle. Not choosing the four maxims centered approach but the paragraph-order centered method instead, the paper would present the advantages of vertical analysis—to grasp better the mental changes of the characters, to understand deeply the characteristic of their personality and to clarify further the author’s writing aim, not just to analyze the dialogues respectively. Using this method, the reader could see a lively Tess standing in front of them. Of course, the paper has its own disadvantages; that is, the times of violating the four maxims could not be counted, and further statistical analysis and horizontal analysis could not be reached.