A Study Of Conversational Implicature In The Fictional Dialogues Of The Joy Luck Club

Researches and criticisms on The Joy Luck Club, the world-famous classic of thedistinguished Chinese-American woman writer Amy Tan, have been diverse in approachesand numerous in numbers. As a qualitative case study, this thesis endeavors to study theconversational implicature in fictional dialogues of The Joy Luck Club from a new pragmaticapproach on the basis of Grice's Conversational Implicature Theory.The Joy Luck Club is the first well-known book of Amy Tan. The story is centered onfour families, describing experiences of four mothers before and after they emigrate fromChina to America as well as the conflicts between mothers and daughters. It provides a superbtext for the case studies of conversational implicature with rich implications in dialoguesmade among characters in various contexts.Dialogues in a fiction are the basic materials which help create characters'images. Whencreating dialogues among characters, Amy Tan, on one hand, employs dialogues to depict thedifferent images of characters; on the other hand, she uses the diverse motives of hearers andspeakers to produce polysemy, which makes the dialogues in this fiction vivid in language andrich in implicature.The implicatures in selected examples from The Joy Luck Club have been elaborated atlength. Cases are classified into different categories according to its violation of each maximof the Cooperative Principle while the factors of context and politeness are taken into account.It is found that characters in hope of producing implicatures usually violate maxims andemploy tortuous methods. The reasons why people constantly flout the conversationalmaxims and convey their real intention in an indirect way are that they try not to damageothers'faces out of the consideration of politeness.The author, by exploring the conversational implicature in The Joy Luck Club from the pragmatic approach, believes this thesis can make certain contribution to a fuller and bettercomprehension of this world-famous classic, help shed light on the application of pragmaticsto the interpretation of fictions as well as enrich the conventional criticisms on this fiction.