A Pragmatic Study Of Character Utterances In A Dream Of Red Mansions

A Dream of Red Mansions (ADM), one of the most influential classical Chinese novels, was written by Cao Xueqin in mid-eighteenth century during the reign of Qing Dynasty. This novel not only displays a panorama of Chinese feudal society before its readers, but also has its unique artistic style and charm, especially its exquisite and delicate character's utterances, which attract and move many generations of readers deeply.This classic novel creates many lively and attractive characters, and Wang Xifeng is one of the most prominent characters. As is known to us, Wang Xifeng is good at dealing with different people with her outstanding communicative capabilities. Her utterances have been explored from various perspectives. Such as, linguistic criticism perspective, translation perspective, stylistic perspective, pragmatic perspective, relevance and adaptation perspective, etc.. However, it is a pity that fewer scholars comprehensively and fully study her utterances from some incorporated pragmatic perspectives, such as, relevance theory, adaptation theory and relevance-adaptation model. Therefore, the present study aims at exploring Wang Xifeng's utterances under the guidance of theories of relevance and adaptation, the model of relevance-adaptation, and deepening the understanding and application of these three classic pragmatic perspectives, which will be helpful for its readers to further appreciate Wang Xifeng and her utterance characteristics under the pen of Cao Xueqin. At the first place, the present study separately introduces relevance theory and adaptation theory, and then gives a detailed description of relevance-adaptation model. Next, the thesis separately analyzes Wang Xifeng's utterances from three pragmatic aspects:relevance of utterances, adaptation of utterances and contextual dynamics. The result of the present study indicates that while explaining the phenomena of language use, both relevance theory and adaptation theory have its own function. Then, under the guidance of relevance-adaptation model, the present study fully analyzes the process of verbal communication. Meanwhile, the result shows that relevance-adaptation has a mighty power to support the rationality of relevance-adaptation model. It also embodies that the verbal communication between Wang Xifeng and others is an ostensive-inferential process which is constantly to seek relevance and adapt to relevance. Moreover, the author roughly explores the utilizing of pragmatic strategies during the process of Wang Xifeng's verbal communication, and then further discusses the underlying causes of choosing these pragmatic strategies.Through analyzing and exploring Wang Xifeng's typical utterances, her complex character:eloquent, intelligent, worldly-wise, capable and experienced, cruel, treacherous, crafty, etc., is impressively and vividly revealed to readers.Theoretically speaking, to some degree, the present study can contribute to researchers'deep understanding and application of relevance theory, adaptation theory, the relevance-adaptation model, and the mechanism of utterances production and utterances interpretation. On practical applied aspect, not only can the present study give helpful guidance to enhance the communicator's pragmatic awareness and gradually become a successful communicator, but also offers literary values to read into character utterances in literary works.