A Pragmatic Analysis Of A Dream Of Red Mansions

A Dream of Red Mansions written by Cao Xueqin not only has been regarded as thepeak of the Chinese classic novel but also possesses a position of prestige in the history ofworld literature. Criticisms and reviews on A Dream of Red Mansions, this world classicnovel, have been numerous in number and various in approaches.This thesis intends to analyze in detail the conversational exchanges between thecharacters of the novel from the perspective of pragmatics. After reviewing the pragmaticstudy in general, this thesis expounds Austin's and Searle's widely used speech act theory,the cooperative principle (CP) put forward by Paul Grice, the philosopher and logician, aswell as the politeness principle (PP) of Geoffrey Leech and Brown and Levinson'spoliteness theory in detail. Also, this thesis tries to apply the above theories to analyzing thetypical dialogues and conversations, which helps to study this classical novel from theperspective of Pragmatics.From all the elaboration and analysis, it can be seen that pragmatics plays an importantpart in interpreting and analyzing dialogues in the novel. It is also hoped that the pragmaticapproach to A Dream of Red Mansions may help shed some light on the pragmaticinterpretation of other classical novels.