A Study Of Dialogues In Pride And Prejudice From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

This thesis studies the dialogue in the novel Pride and Prejudice. On the whole, it mainly belongs to a qualitative study based on literary text. Its theoretical framework is on the basis of Adaptation Theory, put forward by Verschueren. Theoretically, it aims at the improvement of whether the Adaptation Theory has a great explanation power on dialogue in novels, namely, whether novel dialogue is adaptable to mental world, social world and physical world.Dialogue is a main measure taken by characters in novels for communication. As a fairly common form of characters'speech in novels, dialogue plays an important role in revealing the theme of a novel, helping plot development and intriguing readers'interest. Characters can communicate information by dialogues. In order to have a deep understanding of linguistic choices made by characters, readers have to take into account the factors like language rule, social culture, psychology, and cognition and so on. However, Adaptation theory, put forward by Jef Verschueren, the secretary general of International Pragmatics Association, understands pragmatics from a new perspective. From his point of view, pragmatics is a general cognitive, social and cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena in relation to their usage in forms of behavior. Adaptation Theory thinks language using is a process of continuous linguistic choice making. And the reason why language users can make proper choices during communication is the three properties of language, namely, the variability, negotiability, and adaptability. The process of language using is described and interpreted from the following four angles:contextual correlates of adaptability, structural adaptability, dynamics of adaptation, and salience of adaptation processes. Of these, contextual correlates of adaptability include all the ingredients of the communicative context with which linguistic choices have to be inter-adaptable. The range goes from physical world, social world to mental world. The context is not given in advance, but changes with the continuous development of communication process. According to this theory mode, this thesis conducts a detailed analysis of the dialogues in Pride and Prejudice. It studies how various factors like social, cognitive, cultural and physical ones influence the linguistic choice made by characters from the perspective of adaptation to mental world, social world and physical world. Therefore, it improves that the Adaptation Theory has a great explanation power on the text of novel.The researching processes are arranged as following:Chapter One is an introduction to the purpose of this study, research methodology, language data and thesis structure. Chapter Two describes the features, functions of novel dialogue and a review of linguistic study on Pride and Prejudice. From this review, the writer finds that when studying literary text with pragmatic theory, most Chinese scholars apply such measures as Cooperation Principle, Politeness Principle, Speech Act Theory and Discourse Analysis, but few from the perspective of Adaptation Theory. Chapter Three is the theoretical framework, which is a brief introduction of Adaptation Theory. Chapter Four is an analysis of dialogues in Pride and Prejudice by Adaptation Theory. It analyzes how language users integrate such factors as society, psychology, cognition into the language construction by the adaptation to mental world, social world and physical world in the process of language choice-making. Chapter Five illustrates the findings of this thesis and its limitation as well which is wished to provide help for future research.This thesis analyzes the dialogues in the text of the novel by applying the great explanation power of Adaptation Theory. Meanwhile, the author of this thesis finds that the Adaptation Theory is very helpful for literary text understanding and appreciation, therefore providing a new perspective for literary text understanding and appreciation.