Understanding Conversational Implicatures Of Lovers In American Love Movies Of The 1990s With The Help Of Cooperative Principle And Politeness Principle

In the study of pragmatics, conversations between all kinds of people have been cited forillustration. This thesis focuses on a special group of people---lovers and attempts to analyzethe conversational implicatures from the perspective of pragmatics.Three theories are employed in this thesis, i.e. Grice's Cooperative Principle (CP), Brown andLevinson's off-record strategies, and Leech's Politeness Principle. They are carefullyreviewed to provide a clear theoretical framework and tool for analyzing the conversationalimplicature and indirect expression. In review of the development and current studies of CP,some studies are found involving lovers and genders. For example, in the article The Rhetoricof Courtship: Conversation and Cooperation in Newspaper Personal Ads, Ervin (1990)deduces that the female is more cooperative than the male and therefore violates the maximsless frequently. The focus of this thesis is the application of these theories in the conversationsbetween lovers, the analysis of how they do Face-threatening Acts (FTAs), and interpretationof thus generated conversational implicature.Taking into consideration that few people are willing to open their intimate conversation withtheir lovers to the public, the data and cases will be selected from classic love movies ofAmerica in the 1990s for illustration by use of the employed theories in this thesis. Theillustrations are classified into different categories in accordance with the linguistic realizationof the off-record strategies for a comparative analysis. There are two extremes of theconversation between lovers. Sometimes they will be so frank to express their feelings, butsometimes they will be so indirect to convey their real meanings in order to avoid hurting theother party's feelings. This thesis focuses on the second situation. One purpose of violatingCP is to convey a potential implication in consideration of politeness. In order to reduce theface damage to the hearer, the speaker always conveys his real meaning and feeling in aseemed politeness way at the expense of the CP to avoid conflicts, embarrassment or othernegative results. Generally speaking, the conversational implicature is definite under certaincontext. However, due to the differences of philosophy and background knowledge, suchimplicature is not always understood. This thesis has elaborated the generation andinterpretation of conversational implicature of the specific case by use of the above mentionedtheories.In this thesis, we have separated lovers as a special group for systematic study based on whichsome conversational norms are found. Pragmatic theories are employed to analyze the scriptsof the movie which may widen the application of pragmatics in the literary field. Hopefully,this thesis can help the audience better enjoy and understand love movies, and maintain thestable and harmonious relationship in real human interaction. Finally, limitations of this studyand suggestions for further studies are provided.