A Pragmatic Study Of The Conversations Of Major Characters In The Portrait Of A Lady

Discourse analysis is an interdisciplinary field of study and has been applied widely to investigations in such fields as philosophy, linguistics, psychology and literary criticism. Since the 1980s, theories of pragmatics such as the Speech Act Theory developed by Austin and Searle, the Cooperative Principle by Grice, the Politeness Principle by Leech, Brown and Levinson, and procedures for conversation analysis by Sinclair and Coulthard have been widely applied to analysis of texts of various genres, including literary texts.According to Pratt (1977) there is no contradiction between"literary language"and"ordinary language". Discourse analysis may prove to be an effective approach to study language in literature, capable of revealing the theme or the characterization in fiction.Based on such assumption, the thesis attempts to analyze the conversations in The Portrait of a Lady by drawing insights from the research findings in discourse analysis. The Portrait of a Lady is generally regarded as the best of the early works by Henry James, the American novelist. By creating lively conversations among characters, Henry James demonstrated the contrast of character between the na?ve Americans and the sophisticated Europeans, reflecting the innocence of the new world in conflict with the corruption and wisdom of the old. Major conversations between Isabel Archer, the heroine, and the intimate group of the men surrounding her, namely Lord Warburton, Caspar Goodwood and Osmond Gilbert are chosen for detailed analysis in the present paper.In analyzing the conversations, the Speech Act theory is used to reveal how characters with different identities and personalities perform their directives indirectly and politely. The Cooperative Principle is used to find out how and why the characters violate the maxims of the Cooperative Principle in their conversations, and how the conversational implicatures are generated in the discourse. The Politeness Principle is used to examine how different characters have adopted the politeness strategies to their advantages in communication.The analysis of the conversations has helped to reveal the sharp contrast in personality between the characters from the two continents and to demonstrate the international theme of this novel, thus providing a new perspective to understand Henry James.