The Pragmastylistic Probe Into 'night, Mother

Pragmatics, as an important branch of linguistics, mainly studies language in use, that is, how the meaning of language is generated and comprehended in specific context. While stylistics focuses on style studies and interpretation of texts, which is a synthetic discipline covering a wide range of subjects, such as linguistics, literature, psychology, and semiotics. In recent years, with the dynamic development of pragmatics and stylistics, especially in their research fields, objects as well as their methods, and the combination of pragmatics with literature and stylistics, pragmastylistics, as a branch of literary stylistics, comes into being. This thesis attempts to interpret'night, Mother from a pragmastylistic perspective, aiming to explore a brand– new angle of drama studies. The playwright's artistic skills and the aesthetic values of the drama, which are hard to touch upon by other theories, are to be probed into as well.There were three female playwrights who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980s, and Marsha Norman was one of them. With her famous work'night, Mother, she gained an international fame at her time and was awarded with many other prizes: Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and Tony Award nomination, etc. Once published,'night, Mother has aroused broad interest and been translated into over 20 languages, continuing to be performed around the world, and also having been acted twice in China. Despite the fact that both domestic and international scholars have adopted various theories from different angles, to analyze or comment on this work, few people have attempted to expound it from a pragmastylistic perspective so far.This thesis attempts to carry on the research under a pragmastylistic theoretical framework created by Dr. Li Huadong. Thirty examples selected from'night, Mother,including stage instructions and conversations, are to be analyzed by employing Grice's cooperative principle and Leech's politeness principle as well as Brown and Levinson's politeness theory. On one hand, the complex interpersonal relationship under the dual structure of dramatic text will be deeply anatomized. On the other hand, with inferring the implicated meaning as a central task, the aesthetics values will be further revealed through an analysis on the language of this drama. The author holds that through the pragmastylistic study on the interpersonal relationship of'night, Mother, the complicated author-reader relationship and the relationships between characters can be better understood. Besides, the research on aesthetic values can present a vivid picture of the characters and demonstrate a dynamic power change between mother and daughter, which will contribute to a better understanding of the playwright's artistic skills, further helping to perceive the style of the drama.This thesis tries to apply the pragmastylistic theories and its analytical method to the study of dramatic text. Through a speculative argumentation and deduction on the dramatic text, the drama's theme has been better revealed, thus deepening people's understanding of drama production. Meanwhile, this pragmastylistic analysis of drama language has served as a way to test the feasibility of employing pragmastylistic theories and principles to literary works, so that these two subjects can complement each other. It is sincerely hoped that this pragmastylistic study of'night, Mother can provide a new perspective to drama appreciation; furthermore, the research findings can be enlightening for the study and appreciation of other literary works in a general sense.