On Paralanguage And Conversational Implicature In Desperate Housewives

Paralanguage and conversational implicature are important phenomenon in daily communication. They play a significant role in people's daily communication. Paralanguage is not only the concomitant of language; it is also an indispensable element in verbal communication. It plays an important part in expressing conversational implicature and emotions. So linguists retain keen interest on them, and many studies on them have been conducted and abundant accomplishments have been achieved.However, most studies on paralanguage and conversational implicature are isolated, and studies which put paralanguage and conversational implicature together and explore the relations of them are rare as the phoenix. So putting paralanguage and conversational implicature together will not only help people have better and deeper understanding of paralanguage but also open up a new perspective for conversational implicature study. This thesis chooses hit American TV serial Desperate Housewives as data source, tries to analyze relations between paralanguage and conversational implicature as well as the use and roles of paralanguage in realization of conversational implicature. In this thesis, paralanguage is narrow-sensed and based on Noah Webster's definition (1983:853), it is defined as: optional vocal effects (as tone of voice) that accompany or modify the phonemes of an utterance or replace the utterance and that may communicate meaning, including silence and pause.This thesis first reviews related documents on paralanguage and conversational implicature both overseas and in China and emphasizes issues like definitions, classifications of paralanguage and inferential mechanisms for conversational implicature which are closely related to this thesis. After analyzing the previous achievements of paralanguage, this thesis redefines and reclassifies paralanguage, on that base, the study is carried out, the whole of which can be divided into three steps: data selection, data collection and data analysis. Conversational implicature in this thesis are picked out because the utterance which is accompanied by paralanguage violates Grice's maxim of Manner. And this thesis divides paralanguage into four categories: voice identifies; vocal characterizers; functional utterance as well as vocal alternants. And then the author elaborated the four categories into 15 paralanguage subcategories for study convenience. And the data is collected and classified according to the 15 subcategories. After that the author analyzes the data and finally draws some conclusions.After categorization and the analysis, three major findings have been achieved: the first of which is that in conversation, the relations between paralanguage and conversational implicature are determined by relations between paralanguage and verbal language. When paralanguage and language are harmonious, which means paralanguage coincides with the literal meaning of verbal language, there is no conversational implicature; when paralanguage and language are unharmonious, which means paralanguage and the literal meaning of verbal language don't coincide with each other, there is conversational implicature; or when category of functional utterance and vocal alternants replace language and be used independently, there is conversational implicature; the second of which is when paralanguage subcategories are used to assist verbal language, they can be used both independently and mixedly. But the percentage of mixed-use is much lower than that of independent-use. Some patterns in mixed-use are generalized too: vocal characterizers are indispensable while functional utterance and vocal alternants are optional. And when paralanguage is used independently, the first four paralanguage subcategories which are used more frequently are: tone, silence, voice alternants and pause. The third of the findings is that the roles of paralanguage can be divided into two parts: one of which is the speaker roles and the other is the hearer roles. To the speaker, a, paralanguage is an ostension,it has ostensive role; b, paralanguage is the most direct and main force of expressing emotions; to the hearer, paralanguage is helpful to choose proper cognitive assumptions and construct cognitive context, therefore enable the inferential process to go smoothly.At last, limitations of the research and suggestions for further study are pointed out.