Analysis Of The Conversational Implicature In Juvenile Talks That Violate The Cooperative Principle

The American philosopher and linguist Grice was the first one to put forward the theory of Cooperative Principle(CP)in 1967.He thought that verbal communication was a process of collaborative efforts.Communicators should observe some guiding rules to make highly effective communications whether two communicative sides are different from culture levels and family backgrounds or not.However,in specific contexts,communicators sometimes purposefully flout Cooperative Principle causing Conversational Implicature(CI).Listeners have to deduce speakers' implied meanings.Therefore,the CI isn't concerned with what speakers say,but focuses on the implications of speakers.Grice stated briefly that the meanings conveyed by communicators far exceeded their literal meanings in daily conversations.In recent years,an increasing number of studies have used CP and CI theories to analyze conversations in many fields,such as film dialogues,the novel language,advertising commentary,and so on.Based on the previous research,this thesis uses CP and CI theories to make a further study on an American popular TV serials--Pretty Little Liars.Dwelling on the violation of CP,this thesis adopts a research methodology of combining the qualitative method with the quantitative method to study the CI among teenagers in the second season in Pretty Little Liars.Two questions are addressed in this thesis.(1)What is the frequency distribution of juvenile talks that violate the maxims of CP?(2)What CIs are produced by means of violating the CP? By analyzing the data in Pretty Little Liars,the author attempts to discuss communicators' implied meanings and true intentions under the circumstances of violating the CP.The major findings of this thesis are as follows: firstly,as far as the violation of four maxims is concerned,the quantity maxim is the most frequently violated,followed by relevance maxim,quality maxim and manner maxim.Secondly,in order to deliver their implied meanings,the main characters in Pretty Little Liars use many methods,such as rhetorical questions,providing false information,being vague,changing topics,and so on.The limitation of this thesis is although the author tries to adopt the newest corpus from one of the most popular soap operas,it still has some distance from our living language in daily conversations.Some of the utterances are defined by the means of art,thus not all the utterances suffice to prove that speakers violate the CP.There are some suggestions for future research.Firstly,the corpus should be collected as complete and comprehensive as possible.In future research,the utterances from TV serials,movies,classic books are also worth being accumulated and analyzed.Secondly,the language mechanism used to guide the conduction of conversations should be made a comprehensive analysis.And the reasons why the CI is generated should give more detailed explanations.