Conversational Implicature In A Political Interview

The thesis presents a case study of Washington Post interview with Premier Wen Jiabao to explore the conversational implicature in political interviews from the perspectives of systemic functional linguistics and pragmatics. The constitution of conversations and the special features of political interviews give the possibility and feasibility of analyzing the conversational implicature. The difference between political interviews and the daily conversations makes the conversational implicatures in political interviews more complex than that in daily conversations.Pragmatics puts forward the concept of conversational implicature which no other linguistic schools have touched upon. The conversational implicature in pragmatics is the meaning inferred by the Cooperative Principle and its maxims to bridge the gap between the language forms and the speaker's intended meaning. Cooperative Principle and its maxims which work as the monitor of the communication is the deep presumption that the communicators must observe while communicating. Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle prove to be very useful in working out the conversational implicature. Cooperative Principles and its maxims are not the concepts of the level of meaning, they are the concepts of the code level which decides the option of meaning.Conversational implicature is the concept of meaning. It is held in systemic functional linguistics that the meaning is determined by the social semiotics. That is to say,"In systemic functional linguistics, language is being regarded as the encoding of a'behaviour potential'into a'meaning potential'; that is, as a means of expressing what the human organism'can do', in interaction with other human organisms, by turning it into what he'can mean'. What he can mean (the semantic system) is in turn, encoded into what he'can say'(the lexicogrammatical system, or grammar and vocabulary)"(Halliday, 1978:21).We can see from above that the pragmatics and systemic functional linguistics can complement each other on the study of conversational implicature. The complexity of the conversations in political interviews adds greatly to the difficulty of...