Analysis Of The Main Characters’ Personalities In Anna Karenina From The Perspective Of Conversational Implicature Theory

Anna Karenina is one of the representative novels written by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy and it is considered as a great works in the world.The conversations in Anna Karenina cover nearly one third of the whole text according to the statistics,by which personalities of the characters in the novel are created.In literature review,the previous studies on Anna Karenina mainly focus on analyzing it from different angles such as Anna’s image,the relationship between Anna Karenina and the author,tragic theme and so forth.However,there is no related study on the main characters’ personalities in Anna Karenina through analyzing the conversations from the perspective of pragmatics.Therefore,this study attempts to take the four main characters Anna,Vronsky,Levin and Dolly in Anna Karenina as research subjects and apply theories of conversational implicature so as to explore the four main characters’ personalities in the light of literary pragmatics.As a new interdisciplinary subject which emerges in the 1980 s and combines pragmatic theories and literary theories,literary pragmatics has widened the research range of pragmatics and literature and received more and more attention from linguists and litterateurs.Cooperative Principle put forward by Grice in 1975 is regarded as the core part of conversational implicature theory.Grice’s Cooperative Principle can be used to account for why a conversational implicature is produced but it can’t explain why people often fail to observe Cooperative Principle and communicate in an indirect and implicit way.Consequently,Politeness Principle put forward by Leech in 1983 can make a supplement to Cooperative Principle and explain the reason.The combination of Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle forms a comprehensive framework for the accurate understanding of conversational implicature.This study attempts to take Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Leech’s Politeness Principle as theoretical framework and select twenty-seven conversations between the four main characters Anna,Vronsky,Levin and Dolly from Anna Karenina.The personalities of the four main characters in Anna Karenina will be analyzed systematically and deeply through conversation analysis and comparative analysis so that the different personalities Tolstoy wants to express canbe revealed.This study finds that the application of the four maxims of Cooperative Principle and the six maxims of Politeness Principle helps to grasp the pragmatic strategies used by the four main characters in their daily communication,revealing the four main characters’ different personalities and helping readers understand and appreciate Anna Karenina better.This study is a new attempt of the study of literary pragmatics and it provides a new angle to study Anna Karenina.