Conversational Implicature-based Analysis And Translation Of Character Utterances In A Dream Of Red Mansions

This thesis intends to study character utterances in A Dream of Red Mansions from the perspective of Grice's conversational implicature in terms of its implicature and function, and explore its translation method.A Dream of Red Mansions is a great classical novel written in the mid-eighteenth century during the reign of Emperor Qian Long of the Qing Dynasty. The novel not only has a profound ideological content and progressive political tendency, but an attractive art form, especially character utterances by which readers are fascinated and moved.But it is a great pity that although many people have studied character utterances in the novel, few did it from the perspective of pragmatics, which is a newly arising discipline. In order to convey the author's intention, and grasp the artistry of character utterances, the theory of pragmatics is indispensable.The theory of conversational implicature is one of the single most important theories in pragmatics. Since meanings are coated with culture and determined by the writer's/speaker's intention in a given context, it is quite difficult to bring out absolutely both the intended meaning in the context and the cultural, linguistic aspects of the original message, and it can be done from the perspective of conversational impicature.This thesis first introduces two important concepts in pragmatics, i.e. meaning and context, and then introduces Grice's Cooperative Principle and the theory of conversational implicature. With the general pragmatic theories combined with Chinese pragmatic ideas, the thesis analyzes the implicature and the function of character utterances in the novel and the importance of discourse markers with Chinese characteristics in the process of analysis. On this basis, this thesis explores its translation principle, strategy and method by comparing the two famous English versions, one is translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, the other is by David Hawkes and John Minford.