| Ernest Hemingway is one of the most celebrated American writers and the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. There have been many studies about Hemingway's works and about himself, which attract many scholars and critics'attention. In the early studies, much of the academic energy has been devoted to the research of Hemingway's novels and novellas. Compared with them, less academic energy has been spent on the studies of his short stories. But in recent years, the studies of his short stories have become a focus of academic interest. More and more articles and books on Hemingway's short stories appear. Most of the researchers have made great effort to study Hemingway's artistic features, for example, his"iceberg principle", and some centered on his life experience. In addition to the study of the writing style of Hemingway's short stories, most critics and scholars have devoted a great deal of effort in examining his existentialism and attitudes on love and religion, which are reflected in Hemingway's short stories. However few has studied Hemingway's short stories from the multiple perspective--- that is, the conversational analysis, literature and discourse pragmatics--- to examine the dialogues between the characters to reflect his superb art of story-writing. As an interdisciplinary linguistic approach, pragmatics, starting from functional linguistics, aims to study the language phenomena, effects and processes. So it has achieved breakthroughs in many cases of discourse analysis. At present, it has been showing its powerful interpretative ability in the area of literary pragmatics. So this thesis attempts to apply some fundamental pragmatic theories to analyze the dialogues in Hemingway's short stories: Hills Like White Elephants, A Day's Wait, A Catin the Rain and The Killers.This thesis includes five chapters:Chapter One introduces the background, importance, significance and research methodology and outline of the research. It also points out the subject or topic of the thesis. Then it presents the aim of the study--- to employ pragmatic theories and principles to analyze the dialogues in Hemingway's short stories. Chapter Two deals with the part of literature review. It reviews the history of research of Hemingway's works, the development of pragmatics, the relevant theories as well as the pragmatic theories and principles, which provide the basis of further research and at the same time point out the research orientation of analyzing the dialogues in the short stories. Chapter Three analyzes in depth the theoretical framework: the cooperative principle put forward by Grice, the politeness principle by Leech and the politeness strategies by Brown, as well as Austin's and Searle's speech act theory will be discussed. Among these theories, Speech Act Theory, especially the Indirect Speech Act, can elucidate how the conversational implicatures are produced through the speech acts. Cooperative Principles can reveal the relationship between literal meaning and the real meaning of the utterance. And the Politeness Principles can interpret why people usually express his or her real intention implicitly in their communications with others. Finally, this chapter has formed the theoretical framework or model of the study. Chapter Four is the pragmatic literary analysis of characters'dialogues. The author will use his or her theories mentioned in chapter three to analyze in depth the dialogues in Hemingway's short stories and to go a step further, to dissect the conversational implicature behind the characters'dialogues to initiate a certain literary effect, such as shaping the character, revealing the relationship and mind between the characters, propelling the development of plot, and bringing the theme into light and so on. Chapter Five discusses the conclusion of the whole thesis, the major findings of the analysis, the limitation of the study as well as the suggestions for the further study.It is expected that this may help shed some light on the usefulness of the pragmatic approaches to the interpretation and appreciation of the dialogues between characters in Hemingway's short stories and may provide heuristic ideas for people to appreciate better the art of literary works. In addition to the above, this study also contributes to serve as a reference for further linguistic literary teaching, translation and so on. |
