Communicative Intention And Conversational Implicature: Pragmatic Analysis Of Conversations Between Baoyu And Daiyu In Hongloumeng

Overviewing the current studies on Hongloumeng in the fields of foreign language studies in China,three major fields can be sorted out—translation,cultural or cross-cultural studies and pragmatic studies.Among them the translation study account for an overwhelming majority and the pragmatic study shares a very small proportion.This research is an exploration of the conversations in Hongloumeng.It is the pragmatic study of the conversations between Baoyu and Daiyu and belongs to a micro-level study.In this thesis the theory of ostensive-inferential communication proposed by Sperber and Wilson is utilized.In the process of conveying speaker's intention, context can never be overemphasized.The purpose of this study is to explore the communicative intentions and conversational implicatures in the conversations between Baoyu and Daiyu under the guidance of ostention-inferential communication theory and the categorization of context.And in the process of interpreting the conversations,the author also wants to verify that contextual factors are essential for interpretation and context does exist before,during and after the conversation.In a traditional way communication is seen as encoding and decoding messages. Grice views communication as essentially the recognition of the speaker's intention by the audience.Sperber and Wilson are in favor of the inferential approach.They argue "Communication is successful not when hearers recognize the linguistic meaning of the utterance,but when they infer the speaker's 'meaning' from it".In fact,inferential communication and ostension is one and the same thing seen from two angles.From the communicator's point of view,it is ostension,showing,or making manifest his informative intention;and from that of the audience it is inference,inferring from the evidence presented the communicator's intentions. Hence,a complete characterization of communication,by adding there two sides together,is that it is ostensive-inferential.Most communication is intentional by nature.It is very necessary to explore and understand the speaker's intention which is real but sometimes concealed. Sperber & Wilson proposed that intentions can be divided into two categories: informative intention and communicative intention.Informative intention is to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumption.Communicative intention is to make it mutually manifest to audience and communicator that the communicator has this informative intention.The true communicative intention is that kind of intention meant to have one's informative intention recognized. Communication succeeds as soon as the communicator's communicative intention becomes mutually manifest.Every utterance is seen as communicating a variety of propositions,some explicitly,others implicitly.Any assumption communicated,but not explicitly so,is implicitly communicated:it is an implicature.On the analogy of 'implicature',we call an explicitly communicated assumption an explicature.Conversational implicature is something which is implied in conversation,that is,something which is left implicit in actual language use.To draw a conclusion,this thesis sets out to discuss the conversations between Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu--the two main characters in the Chinese literary masterpiece Hongloumeng with the theories of ostensive-inferential communication and the categorization of implicature proposed by Sperber and Wilson by virtue of context.It discusses the exuberance of their conversation,the hidden communicative intention,and their abundant meanings or implications.