Pragmatic Analysis Of Silence In Prison Break

Pragmatic analysis is an interdisciplinary research, the theory and methodology of which, in recent years, have been extensively applied to the interpretation of the dramatic texts. TV series, as one of the extended forms of drama with distinctive features, has long been neglected by the stylisticians. This thesis is an attempt to apply the theory and techniques of DA to the analysis of conversations in the TV plays, taking the American series Prison Break as a case.Conversations have always been the focus of pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Of which a great number of researches have been conducted both at home and abroad. But most of them are done with data from Discourse Completion Test (DCT) questionnaire or role-play. So far there is not much study of English conversations with data from TV drama under the context of prison; nor is there study of silence, an essential part of conversation.This thesis makes a study of the conversations from the perspective of discourse analysis with Grice's Cooperative Principle, Leech's Politeness Principle and Brown and Levinson's Face-saving Theory to analyze silences in American Series Prison Break, and explores the functions of silence by employing the qualitative method.