Pragmastylistic Probe Into Dubliners

This is an interdisciplinary study of linguistics and literature. Taking Dubliners as the subject of study, pragmatic theories, especially the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle as the analytical framework, the present study aims to investigate how the pragmatic principles and their concomitant maxims are violated in the dialogic relationships of various kinds in Dubliners, and then find out the meaning implied in them, which is conducive to disclosing the thematic meaning and depicting the relationships of different kinds between fictional characters.Different from the spoken discourse, literary text, as a kind of written discourse, involves double communicative contexts: one lies in the real world and the other in the fictional world, which leads to the two-level communication. On the micro-level communication, we find the dialogue in ordinary sense where characters talk to characters; and on the macro-level communication, we find the dialogues in Bakhtin sense in which the author encodes and the readers decode on the one hand and the narrator presents his/her opinions on the fictional characters on the other.Based on the dialogic nature of literary text, in this study we try to apply the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle and their concomitant maxims to Dubliners and find out:1. As for the dialogues between the fictional characters, the violation of the maxims under the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle may help the readers to be familiar with the subtle relationship of different kinds between fictional characters, which thus paves the way for us to look into and appreciate the short stories.