Conversational Implicature In Legend Of Zhen Huan From The Perspective Of Cooperative And Politeness Principle

The TV play, Legend of Zhen Huan, has caused widespread concern since its broadcast. The wonderful conversations, especially Zhen Huan’s, are highly praised by the audience. Zhen Huan’s intelligence and erudition have been fully reflected from her conversations with other characters. Previous research on Legend of Zhen Huan mainly focuses on areas like Literature and Medical Science, and the analysis of it is limited to a small number of conversations. The artistry of language use cannot be thoroughly disclosed. Therefore, this study, revolving around the discussion of Zhen Huan’s utterances from the perspective of Pragmatics, aims to achieve two objectives:firstly to improve the theoretical framework used in this thesis to make it better applicable to the analysis of Chinese literature; secondly to analyze the implied meaning from the perspective of language use to make up for the deficiency of literary analysis.This study adopts Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Politeness Theory as its main theoretical reference, together with the improvements on the above theories which have been made in the process of analyzing Zhen Huan’s utterances. From the analysis of typical conversations involving Zhen Huan and the comparisons of her three stages of life, the artistry of Zhen Huan’s language in different situations are disclosed and the feasibility of the improvements on Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle are verified. Moreover, in order to enhance the persuasiveness of qualitative analysis, data on four aspects in the three stages are displayed:violation of the maxims of Cooperative Principle, rhetorical devices that flout the maxims of Cooperative Principle, observance of Politeness Principle, and maxims violated by Zhen Huan towards characters of different relationships.Through analyzing Zhen Huan’s utterances from the perspective of Linguistics, it can be found that though Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Politeness Theory are significant in the interpretation of conversational implicature, there still exist deficiencies. So the author has improved the theories above in the analysis by adding rhetorical devices, citation and deliberate misinterpretation, into the violation of the first maxim of Quality, adding a new maxim, providing more information by a third party, into the violation of the second maxim of Quantity, adding relying on the authority into the violation of the maxim of Relation, adding the change of address forms into the violation of the maxim of Manner, and adding Tolerance and Humor into Politeness Principle. It can be found that the improved Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle can be applied in the analysis of Chinese conversational implicature. In addition, through the analysis of the data in the three stages of Zhen Huan’s life, it can be found that Zhen Huan produces conversational implicature by violating more on the maxim of Quality and Quantity, and shows her humbleness and respect by observing Politeness Principle. And as for the rhetorical devices, Zhen Huan conveys her real intentions more frequently by metaphor, rhetorical question, irony and citation. Zhen Huan has skillfully changed her ways of speaking and perfectly expressed her real thoughts to achieve communicative goals according to the characters whom she talks to, contents of the conversations and the change of her identity. The intelligence of Zhen Huan has been reflected and the artistry of language in Legend of Zhen Huan has been disclosed.Through the analysis of Zhen Huan’s utterances, the author not only improves the theoretical framework so as to analyze the Chinese literature more thoroughly, but also analyzes Zhen Huan’s utterances from the perspective of Linguistics for the purpose of making up for the abstractness of literature analysis, interpreting the conversational implicature more objectively and displaying the artistry of the language in Chinese literature.