An Analysis Of The Dialogues In Let The Bullets Fly From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

Film, an art of dialogues and acting, has a close connection with our daily life, so its dialogues have great value in linguistic study. Based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature Theory, this thesis carried out the pragmatic analysis of character utterances in Let the Bullets Fly.Let the Bullets Fly tells us a story between the bandits, a cheater and a bully in the Goose Town which took place in the period of the Northern Warlords. Besides strong cast and gripping stories, this film also has vivid, appropriate and meaningful utterances. Since the release of this film, it has caused continuous dispute. Using Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature Theory to analyze the dialogues in the film can help us to have a deeper understanding of the characters’ features and the film’s connotation.As an important field of pragmatics, Conversational Implicature Theory is proposed by Grice, an American linguist and philosopher. It aims to study the meanings that the traditional semantics can’t explain. Grice also has put forward the famous Cooperative Principle and its related maxims. And conversational implicature is mainly raised by violating or following these rules.Grice’s Conversational Implicature Theory is employed in this thesis to analyze the dialogues selected elaborately by the writer from the film Let the Bullets Fly. According to the violation of each maxim of the Cooperative Principle, the selected dialogues are divided into four categories. Based on the research, the writer reached the following conclusions:on the one hand, the author creates conversational implicatures by violating the maxims in order to display dramatic conflicts and characters’ psychological movements:on the other hand, this thesis has proved the feasibility of applying Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature Theory to analyze the dialogues of classic films. In addition, the writer hope this thesis can provide certain help to the translators of the film subtitles..