Pragmatic Research On Cooperative Principle In Literary Discourse

Language is the carrier for people to express their emotions. As an independent humanity discipline, linguistics is not only the study of structure and characteristics of language itself(structural linguistics), but also the study of applications in other disciplines(pragmatics). As a subordinate humanistic discipline, literature uses words as the instrument and it is an important manifestation of culture. Literature is in a form of fiction, which reflects the objective reality visually and shows the writers’ artistic creation. Jane Austen was one of the most famous English female novelists during the 18 th and 19 th century. She has extremely high level of language expressing ability, which made her literary works very influential in English literature even in the world literature at that time. Austen lived in a relatively stable countryside village where the feudal force was very strong. She was born in a rich family and didn’t marry all her life. From the ideological level, her literary works show her moral concern and emphasize the harmony of society and family. Readers can find the females’ different attitudes towards love and marriage. By reading his novels, readers can have their ideas of the social environment at that time.Jane Austen created six major works in her life. This thesis takes the novel Pride and Prejudice as research object to discuss the application of the cooperative principle in the novel. Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen’s the second novel. The author mainly took the romantic but also full of twists and turns love journey between the hero Darcy and the heroine Elizabeth as the main clue. Austen reflected the moral standard of both family and society mainly through different the characters’ social communication in the novel. The linguistic feature is quite obviously displayed in the novel. The main expressive form is to reflect different characteristics through different patterns of the characters’ conversations. The application of Grice’s cooperative principle(CP) is much more obvious between the different characters in the novel. In fact, Grice proposed the cooperative principle in 1976. There have been a great many research achievements on cooperative principle since the principle was born. As an important component in linguistic research, pragmatics focuses thepractical application as its key points in its studies. A growing number of scholars have further analyzed the language communicative method and the conversational implicature according to the cooperative principle. Therefore, this topic can help readers deepen their understanding the mechanism of literary language and the meaning of literary discourse..The theoretical framework of this thesis is based on the cooperative principle in pragmatics. There are four maxims in cooperative principle, which are the maxim of quantity, the maxim of quality, the maxim of relation and the maxim of manner.Among these maxims, each maxim has its corresponding rules. The maxim of quantity emphasizes discourse information and it has two sub-maxims. The first one is that the information should be needed for communication; the second one is that the unneeded information can not be included. The maxim of quality requires that communicators can not talk things that are not true or lack for evidence. The maxim of relation requires that the speaker should speak something connectively and relevantly. The maxim of manner is used for judging whether the speaker’s information is clear or not. It has four sub-maxims: avoid obscurity of expression,avoid ambiguity, be brief and be orderly. In this thesis, the purpose is to analyze the language features of the dialogues between the characters according to the four maxims in sequence. What’s more, it is to analyze how the cooperative principle is practically applied in literary discourse.This thesis chooses the methods of literary research to study the literary language used in Austen’s novel. Firstly, based on the existing investigation of relative literature data, the study of the topic makes a comprehensive analysis of the other researches’ former studies in this field. First of all, the basic research thinking of studying on linguistics by using the corpus of literary language is the main body in the topic research. Then, the qualitative research is used to make the research on concrete objects, which are selected from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In this thesis, the analysis of dialogue is to see whether the dialogues violate the cooperative principle and meet their pragmatic meaning. Then, the characters in the novel are further discussed according to the implicature of corresponding conversations.This study makes clear that the study of linguistics is not only the study of the utterances themselves, but also makes clear the close relationship between literarydiscourse and literariness. Using the theory of linguistics to analyze the literary works is one of the advisable ways. Linguistic study of the literary work has opened up a new perspective for both linguistics and literature studies in the application of linguistics in the research of literary discourse. By analyzing the conversation between the characters, it can also help readers have a better understanding of subtle emotional changes among different characters and their mental characteristics. It can make the readers have a better understand the importance of language in literary creation.The most important linguistic significance of this topic is that it can help the readers in some extent have a better understanding of how cooperative principle applied in literary creation. In addition, this research may help literature amateurs to improve their appreciation level and ability of literary criticism, thus promoting their research abilities in the field of literary criticism with the theory of cooperative principle.