A Pragmatic Study Of Conversational Implicature In A Tale Of Two Cities

Charles Dickens is the most prominent realistic British writer in the19thcentury.One of his masterpieces is A Tale of Two Cities, which amply demonstrates his adroitmanipulation of rhetorical devices like irony, metaphor, hyperbole and so on. Theprevious studies were mostly conducted in the fields of literature, stylistics, translationand sociology. Few are involved in the fields of pragmatics. This thesis is tentative toinvestigate the conversational implicature of the conversations between characters in ATale of Two Cities from the perspective of pragmatics.The pragmatic theories applied to analyzing the conversations in A Tale of TwoCities involve Grice s Cooperative Principle, Leech s Politeness Principle, and Brownand Levinson s Face Theory. Grice s cooperative principle accounts for the relationbetween implicit meaning and literal meaning and interprets how conversationalimplicature is generated and understood, while Leech s politeness principle arecommitted to explaining that speakers more often express their real intention in animplicative and indirect way out of politeness. Brown and Levinson s face theoryexplicates that almost every speech act brings about the face threat to the hearer, but thespeaker tries to reduce the hearer s face damage with politeness strategy.The main body of this thesis elaborates conversations selected from the novel ATale of Two Cities with the above-mentioned pragmatic theories. The illustrations aredivided into different categories in accordance with the violation of the fourconversational maxims of the Cooperative Principle and different types of the off-recordpoliteness strategies, which are analyzed in detail. The characters in the novel breachcertain conversational maxims and adopt off-record politeness strategies in order toindirectly convey conversational implicature and real intention and to reduce thedamage to the hearer s face. The conversational implicature the speaker conveys isdefinite under a specific context which is expected to be understood by the hearer. Theanalysis of conversations among characters in the novel is beneficial to further revealthe conversational implicature behind the conversations to achieve certain literaryeffects, such as characterization, understanding characters personalities, revealingcharacters relationship, propelling the plot development, and understanding the theme.From the analysis, it can be found that Dickens applied many rhetorical devicessuch as irony, metaphor, rhetorical questions, understatement, overstatement, and tautology to fictional conversations. These rhetorical devices are mostly against themaxims of quality or quantity or both. Consequently, the characters in A Tale of TwoCities prefer to violate the maxims of quality and quantity of the CP to express theirimplicit meanings or implicatures. Meanwhile, this thesis also proves that Dickens holdsa negative attitude towards the French Revolution which can be found in the analysis ofa seamstress as well as Mr. and Madam Defarge s conversations. In addition, this thesisstill confirms that irony is main tone of the novel A Tale of Two Cities. The author ofthis thesis hopes to help readers have a better understanding and appreciation of thenovel by virtue of the study. The author also hopes to help readers profoundlyunderstand conversational maxims of the CP and politeness strategies and properlyapply them to daily life so as to promote their communications, to establish a friendlypersonal relationship, and to construct a harmonious society.