Discourse Stylistics Analysis Of The Conversations In Drama Series The Story Of A Noble Family

The Story of a Noble Family is a classical drama series which based on a novel written by the popular Chinese novelist Zhang Henshui. Previous studies are from the perspectives of literary criticism, narrative analysis, aesthetic consciousness and female's fate. Very few evaluate it from a multidimensional linguistic approach to explore the conversations in this drama series. In addition, unlike the literary genres as poetry and fiction which have been principally concerned, drama series, the extended new form of drama in particular, within the analytical framework of stylistics has received little attention.The object of this thesis is to apply the synthesized model (three approaches in discourse stylistics)—conversation analysis, cooperative principle, politeness theory and principle for a comprehensive interpretation of the plot and the characters. From the linguistic perspective, the power distribution is uncovered by employing quantitative turn-taking analysis in conversations, the complicated interpersonal relationship is revealed by analyzing the conversational implicatures and politeness strategies under the framework of pragmatic principles.Based on the above theoretical framework, this thesis tries to answer three questions as follows:(1) What are the subtle changes in social relationships between characters?(2) How are these delicate and complex interpersonal relationships encoded into discourse strategies?(3) How do the character traits differentiate through their use of language strategies?To ensure the accuracy and reliability of the research result, the thesis mainly based on the qualitative method, the quantitative method as supplement.Language resources in this thesis are chosen from the conversations in the times of prosperous and the times of decline of this large family of this 40 episodes drama series respectively. Through analyzing and comparing the conversations from these two sharply different periods, language skills, strategies, power relations and personalities of each major role are fully presented.The implication of the study is that discourse stylistics analysis can serve as a useful linguistic tool in making rational and relatively objective explanations for exploring and revealing the characters and subtle interpersonal relationships in drama.