Character Personalities Are Revealed In Discourses Of Drama

Literature and pragmatics are two different subjects, as they may appear. Yet, since literature demonstrates language in use at its best, more and more scholars have come to realize the close relatedness between literature and pragmatics, esp. discourse analysis. Though many still hold a view of uncertainty and suspicion about the role of literature in discourse analysis, the trend of the research is becoming irreversible.This paper is intended to unfold the relationship between literary characters & their personalities through an analysis of the interactive structure of some classical dialogues in drama, with several linguistic methodologies about discourse, including Grice's well-known Cooperative Principles (CP) , Leech's Politeness Principle (PP) , Turn-taking and Topic controlling as well as Austin and Searle's Speech-act Theory. The classical dialogues will be explored from pragmatic perspective and the relationship between characters as well as character personality will be exposed in an explicit way.Therefore, the main focus of the paper is on how character personality is mirrored in dialogues or how dialogues manage to reflect differentcharacter personalities. The above-mentioned 4 methods, that is, the CP, PP, Speech-act Theory and Turn-taking are the stone-bone of discourse analysis. Without them, discourse analysis would be left a mere skeleton. So this paper is going to make full use of these 4 methods for its definite goal: to reveal character personality.It's universally acknowledged that rarely do characters speak out of the confines of their own social, economical or demographic class. Eyes are the windows of one's soul. In the same vein, words and expressions are the mirrors of one's personality. What's more, dialogues or stage lines are the essence of literature, regardless whatever kind of literary forms poetry, drama, or fiction etc.So with the analysis of conversations & the help of findings in pragmatic theories, we may come to see how those different characters breathe in different ways which suggest their social, economical and educational backgrounds. And in the same sense, their personalities are also expressed in what they say and how they say it. So, by attaching enough importance to the workings of all their dialogues, we can draw the conclusion that character personality can be revealed in their sayings.