A Study Of Dialogues In The Merry Wives Of Windsor From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Dramatic dialogue, as the main element in drama, plays an important role in portraying characters, developing plots and revealing theme. Dramatic dialogue is characters'use of language in specific context. Although there are some differences between dramatic dialogues and real-life conversations, dramatic dialogues are similar to real-life conversations in many aspects. Both of them depend on context and interaction and are under the control of pragmatic principles. Pragmatics, which is the study of language in use in real life, can also be employed to analyze dramatic dialogues. The Belgium linguist Jef Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, as a new creative theory of pragmatics, holds a general cognitive, social and cultural perspective on language in use. The Merry Wives of Windsor is an important comedy of Shakespeare, to which less attention has been paid compared with his other dramas. Hence, Adaptation Theory is used in this thesis to analyze the dramatic dialogues in Shakespeare's comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor in the hope of contributing to a better understanding of this comedy.According to Adaptation Theory, language use as a process of continuous making of linguistic choices has to be dynamically interadaptable with contextual correlates including communicative context such as language users, their mental worlds, social worlds and physical worlds. Guided by this theory, characters'utterances in The Merry Wives of Windsor are carefully explored by examining contextual correlates such as emotion, personality, motivation, social relationship and so on.This thesis has three main findings as follows:Firstly, The Merry Wives of Windsor is a realistic comedy full of life and vigor. The dialogues are vivid and characteristic. Characters'utterances are interadaptable with communicative context like their mental worlds, social worlds and physical worlds.Secondly, one reason for Shakespeare's creation of such vivid and characteristic dialogues is that he abides by the pragmatic principle of Adaptation Theory, although Adaptation Theory hasn't been put forward by Verschueren at that time. Each character's utterances are interadaptable with contexts. In other words, Shakespeare can choose proper languages for different characters in different contexts.Thirdly, Adaptation Theory provides a new pragmatic perspective for the study of drama. The adaptive analysis of dramatic dialogues can help us discover characters'motivation, belief, emotion, personality, the social relationships and cultural background behind their utterances to achieve a better understanding of characters'utterances and appreciation of the drama.