A Pragmatic Study Of Deception In Gone With The Wind

Deception (or"lie"which we will use interchangeably) is a common linguistic phenomenon for everyone. Telling lies, to some degree, is a necessary part in the life. Some feels that lying is just like breathing. As a result, some scholars try to explore the causes, the mental process of lying, as well as the method to detect a lie.From the perspective of pragmatics, this paper employs the quality and qualitative methods, mainly based on the Information Manipulation Theory and Adaptation Theory to study on Gone with the Wind that describes things happened during the Civil War to explore deception from a systematic and dynamic view. The author wants to explore the pragmatic strategies of deception, study the motivations behind deception selection, and understand what pragmatic effect the language users want to achieve. The research results show that: According to the covert violation of Conversational Maxims of IMT, here are four kinds of pragmatic strategies of deception. The first type is, information misrepresentation including falsification, half-concealment and distortion. The second kind is information withholding, i.e. omission. The third one is topic shift, we call that evasion. And the fourth one is information fuzziness, i.e. equivocation. As to the second question, deception is the result of linguistic choices which under different degrees of consciousness adapted to language users'mental worlds, social worlds, and the physical worlds in order to achieve certain communicative goal. Based on the above analysis of deception in Gone with the Wind, two pragmatic effects of deception will be investigated by Face Theory and Politeness Principle. One of the pragmatic effects is to improve the appropriateness of utterances and the other is to improve the interpersonal relationship.Besides, it is significant to study on deception in Gone with the Wind. For it manifests the strong explanatory power on literature works based on pragmatic theories, and it helps people understand and appreciate the literature works better. Moreover, it enlightens the effective communication in our daily life. The author hopes the study would help cross-cultural communication and language teaching.