A Pragmatic Analysis Of The Dialogue In Vanity Fair

A dialogue is the most direct and important way for people to deliver and receiveinformation, and it is also one of the manifestations of characters’ languages in literaryworks. Pragmatics is a new subject in the area of linguistic research. Appreciating literaryworks with the application of pragmatic theories and analyzing the dialogues in novels cannot only reveal characters’ mental activities, personality and ideas, embody characters’activity motivations and relations, but also play an important role in pushing thedevelopment of the plots of the novel.This thesis tries to make a detailed analysis of the dialogues in Vanity Fair from theperspective of pragmatics. Vanity Fair is William Thackeray’s masterpiece in19thCenturyin England, and it is also the famous critical realism novel in England. There is no hero inall the stories, so the subtitle of Vanity Fair is A Novel without a Hero, which is theso-called ‘non-hero’ novel in modern times. And this point is the innovation of Vanity Fair.In the past research, we can know that most researchers analyze the characters and theirdialogues in literary works in the traditional ways; however, few people analyze literaryworks with pragmatic theories. This kind of research can make people have acomprehensive understanding about relative knowledge and the latest development ofpragmatics; and it can also let people know about characteristics, the pros and cons oflanguages in literary works. At the same time, this kind of research is very valuable incomprehending other foreign literary classics and even foreign cultures. In the actual textanalysis, literary pragmatics is mainly used in theatre studies; some scholars make speechact studies to poems, but few people analyze a specific literary work from the perspective ofSpeech Act Theory, especially novels.In this thesis, Austin and Searle’s Speech Act Theory (Austin:2002) is used as aguidance, which combines Leech’s Politeness Principle (Leech:1983) with Grice’sCooperative Principle (Grice,1975) to analyze languages’ artistic quality in Vanity Fair,thus we can appreciate other literary works. In addition, this thesis compares PolitenessPrinciple with Cooperative Principle, from which a conclusion can be made that politenessprinciple is more suitable for daily language. Through Speech Act Theory, we can analyzewhy the characters don’t express themselves directly and what the illocutionary act is;through Cooperative Principle, we can analyze why the characters violate principlesintentionally when they speak; through Politeness Principle, we can analyze the face-offensive act and how the characters take politeness tactics which are useful to them. From what have been mentioned above, it can be seen that pragmatics plays animportant role in analyzing the novel Vanity Fair. Through the analysis in this thesis, wehave a new perspective in understanding literary works—that is analyzing literary worksfrom the perspective of pragmatics.