Analysis Of Conversational Implicature In Emma From The Perspectives Of The Cooperative Principle And The Politeness Theory

Emma is claimed as the climax of Jane Austen's literary creation. This thesis is a detailed analysis of the conversational implicature in Emma from the perspectives of the Cooperative Principle (CP) and the politeness theory.The criticisms of and reviews on Jane Austen and Emma are surveyed with the emphasis on the existent subject matters and approaches. And the discussion of the conversational implicature from the pragmatic approach is thus introduced. Grice's CP and conversational maxims, Brown and Levinson's concept of face and off-record politeness strategies and Leech's Politeness Principle (PP) and maxims are carefully reviewed. The implicature interpretation is touched upon as well. The CP and the related maxims explain how the conversational implicature is produced and interpreted and what is the relation between "sense and force." The PP accounts for the reason why people often violate the conversational maxims and employ indirectness in conveying what they really mean in the conversational interaction. The off-record strategies illustrate different linguistic realizations of utterances which invite conversational implicature and do the face-threatening acts (FTAs) implicitly. These three pragmatic theories are combined to serve as the theoretical framework to facilitate the conversational analysis in Emma.The main body of the thesis is the elaboration of the conversational implicature produced by the selected examples from Emma. The illustrations are classified into different categories in accordance with the linguistic realization types of the off-record strategies and detailed analysis of the examples is made. The characters infringe certain conversational maxims is to convey an implication considering being polite. In order to reduce the face damage to the hearer, the speaker always conveys his real meaning and feeling in a seemingly polite way at the expense of the CP to avoid conflicts, embarrassment or other negative results. Generally speaking, the conversational implicature is definite under a specific context. However, due to the differences of philosophy and background knowledge, such implicature is not always understood. This thesis has elaborated the generation and interpretation of conversational implicature of the specific cases from the perspectives of the above mentioned theories.By exploring the conversational implicature from the pragmatic approach in Emma, this thesis in some ways enriches the conventional Austen studies and widens the application of pragmatics in the literary field. Moreover, this analysis in the thesis reveals the personality of the characters, which may help the audience better understand and enjoy the novel, and maintain the stable and harmonious relationship in real human interaction.