A Pragmatic Study Of Fictional Communication

No account of communication in general will be complete without an account of literature and no account of literature will be complete without an account of its use of the communicative resources (Sell, 1991a: xiv). The basic purpose of pragmatics is to explain linguistic communication, including literary communication.The Greeks of the fifth century B.C. first questioned the act of reading and writing in pondering over the purpose of literature. Ever since, various studies have been carried out on literature, which can be categorized into literary studies, linguistic studies, and pragmatic studies. These studies indicate that it is rational, possible, and feasible to study literary communication from the pragmatic perspective. However, none of the studies can explain the whole process of literary communication, especially that of fictional communication. So this dissertation aims to carry out a pragmatic study of fictional communication with a view to building a pragmatic framework to account for the process of fictional communication.Reviewing the various studies of literature, the dissertation first points out the rationality, possibility and feasibility to study literary communication from the pragmatic perspective as well as the necessity to build a pragmatic framework of literary communication, especially that of fictional communication. Then the dissertation elucidates the term communication and reviews pragmatic studies of communication on the aspects of participant, meaning, context, and pragmatic strategy. Based on the pragmatic theories of communication, the dissertation finally explores fictional communication by studying the participants taking part in fictional communication, the means of fictional communication, the context of fictional communication, the pragmatic strategies used in fictional communication, and the meaning construction in fictional communication.It is argued that not only the author and the reader but also the narrator and the characters take part in fictional communication. Fictional communication between the author and the...