A Pragmatic Approach To The Analysis Of The Dialogues In Mrs. Warren's Profession

Drama is a special form of literature featured by a lot of dialogues. Stylistics of drama is a relatively new inter-disciplinary area of study, which has been closely focused and widely researched. And drama is now being studied from many perspectives including pragmatics. This paper intends to analyze the dialogues in the celebrated dramatist George Bearnad Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession from the perspective of pragmatics.This thesis employs some pragmatic theories including Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Adaptation Theory in the analysis after reviewing the relative studies of pragmatic literature both in the west and in China, the Cooperative Principle and its four maxims are the ideal way of making the conversation go smoothly but the flouting of these maxims also has its purpose and effectiveness. Politeness Principle introduces Face-Threatening acts that always happen in conversation and it also provides different kinds of these acts so as to reveal the underlying intention or the relationship between characters. Adaptation Theory emphasizes the adaptation to the mental, social and physical world.This thesis chooses more than twenty dialogues from Act Two of the drama Mrs. Warren's Profession and makes a detailed analysis of the clash between characters caused by the failure of communication which is closely related to their communication skills. It takes advantage of the pragmatic theories from the above three perspectives in the hope of making sense of how they help in pushing the conflict between characters to the climax and in uncovering their internal world. It is hoped that the pragmatic approach to Mrs. Warren's Profession may shed some light on the usefulness of pragmatic approach in the appreciation of this drama.