A Case Study On The Characters' Utterances In Moment In Peking: From The Perspectives Of Cooperative Principle And Politeness Principle

In interpersonal communication, participants take use of more and more communicative instruments to carry on a conversation, and then the depth and scope of communication are increased and expanded under various environments, which makes the information transmit more vividly. However, utterance still plays a foundational role in the process of exchanging information, establishing and maintaining special interpersonal relationships. And this thesis is intended to seek for the successful daily communicative strategies and skills by analyzing the characters' utterances in Moment in Peking under the theoretical framework of Grice's Cooperative Principle and Leech's Politeness Principle.According to Grice's Cooperative Principle, in utterance communication people always have a common purpose that the utterance of the speaker and the hearer can be understood correctly and the aim of communication can be attained smoothly. In order to achieve this purpose, it is naturally that the speaker and the hearer will observe communicative cooperative principles. Under the guide of Grice's Cooperative Principle, people will establish trust and cooperative relationships and finally achieve the communicative purpose. However, in the practical communication, the speaker and the hearer do not always abide by the Cooperative Principle consistently, and even they will violate these principles. Thus various conversational implicatures generate under different contexts of situation, and in addition, in certain context, the conversational implicatures take on different characteristics influenced by the intention of the writer or the speaker. The reason is their taking the politeness into consideration. In other words, the speaker tends to express the communicative contents reserved and tactful, in order not to hurt the emotion and self-esteem of the hearer.First, the thesis offers a review of some of the scholar's research fruits about Moment in Peking and enquires into the English characteristics of Moment in Peking. Next, it briefly elaborates the theories in usage combining with examples extracted from the novel Moment in Peking. Then detailed analyses will be constructed on the selected characters' utterances from the novel from the two perspectives above, aiming at showing the reason and intention of people's violation of Cooperative Principle and its maxims and probing into the successful communicative strategies and skills. Finally, the author hopes that the pragmatic study on Moment in Peking can give inspiration to the combination of pragmatics and the appreciation of novel.