The Pragmatic Effect Of Literary Language

Detective fiction has attracted a huge number of devoted readers for its unique charm since its birth in 19th century. Because of the fact that the detective writers first created their works for the purpose of money-making; detective fiction reveals in itself traits of"shallowness"as commonly related to genres of popular literature, therefore the effect of being frequently belittled by the literature critics. The reason may be that many people think that the creation of works for the purpose of money has limited literature value. In addition, compared with high literature, the detective fiction often lacks in depth, from the angle of writing techniques, or in skills of the characterization and expressive force. However, people nowadays become gradually aware that, the detective fiction has actually attracted a large number of readers for its unique narrative strategy and organization glamour. With the massive reader group, detective fiction and all the other popular art forms represent the heartfelt wishes and aspirations of the masses, being the art form that are favored highly by the public, and therefore show ever-lasting artistic charm.Agatha Christie is the famous"Queen of Crime"in the history of literature. The content and style of her detective stories are different from the other contemporary works. Therefore, the thesis selects her novels as the text to make a research on, in order to clarify several problems, which is helpful for people to improve reading and appreciating her novels and other detective stories. One of the traits of Agatha Christie's detective fiction is enormous use of the conversations. She uses abundant conversations to depict characters, introduces the settings of the story and sets up the suspense. Therefore, the thesis bears the conversations of her detective fiction in mind, applying the relevant pragmatic theories of literary pragmatics, such as, CP, PP, Pragmatic ambivalence and discourse roles to conduct a research. It selects some typical conversations as data, to find out their obeying or violation of the pragmatic principles and their impact on the characters'personality, development of the plot, and the subtle relationships between the characters, which finally explain the readers'reaction toward the writer's intention and the social significance by the text. On the basis of the complete analysis and exploration of the application of the pragmatic theories in the Agatha Christie's detective fiction, the author discovers that, being one of the popular literary genre, the language and the literature traits of the detective fiction are not like what other critics despise that it is merely a pass time literary genre, its literary effect and impact should be valued by people like high literature. And its literature value should be positively admitted. For example, through employing the pragmatic mechanisms in details description and alienation, if they are explained in details and systematically combed, they will bring new discoveries for the reading and appreciation as other literary genre.