An Analysis Of The Dumb Waiter Of Pinter On The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Harold Pinter is a world well-known playwright, whose unique theatricality makes him carry off the Nobel Prize on Literature in 2005. His plays usually happen in a sealed room and through the small talk of the characters in daily life to reflect the potential mysterious menace of the sealed room. The characters in Pinter's plays regard the language as a weapon and attempt to strive for the right and the identity by using the language.Pinter had said that language was a very ambiguous matter and usually under the words that said, something that was not said clearly existed. Pinter makes use of language as a special tool to vividly express the power relationship and the potential menace behind the words. Language can change the relationship of the characters. At the meantime, it can rebuild the identity as well. Pinter is a master who is good at using the language.This thesis is an interdisciplinary study which applies the pragmatics theory—relevance theory to the interpretation of literary works, which aims to make linguistics better serve the interpretation of literature and to better achieve the communication under the premise of understanding the context and inference of the utterance. This thesis is based on The Dumb Waiter, which is the representative one-act play of Pinter's early phrase and applies the relevance theory to study the language features and the themes.This thesis is divided into four chapters:The first chapter is an overview of the relevance theory. It includes three parts: relevance theory and human communication; the basic concepts of cognitive context, mutual manifestness,'ostensive-inferential model'and relevance; and the function of relevance theory in the literary works.The second chapter applies the relevance theory to interpret The Dumb Waiter of Pinter and mainly analysis the language features of the play from the perspective of relevance theory. The study of language features starts from the vocal, syntactic and semantic features and make the detailed interpretation and analysis of the phenomena such as pause, tone and repetition that appear in the play. The third chapter applies the relevance theory to analyze the themes of the play from the following two perspectives: the menace and power relationship that are reflected by the utterance between the characters in the play.The fourth chapter is conclusion, which summarizes the main content of the thesis at first, then introduces the practical and applicable importance of the thesis and points out the limitation of the study of the thesis and something that needs to be improved.