Indirect Communicative Level In Literary Conversations From Relevance Theory

Compared to Grice’s theory of conversational inplicature, Relevance Theory proposedby Sperber and Wilson provides a more practical and accurate theoretical basis for humancommunication, with its "ostensive-inferential” communicational model a cognitiveexplanatory model to human’s communicative process.Communication not only exists in the form of human speech, but also in written textssuch as literature, whereas some distinctions are evident between the two forms ofcommunication. Consequently, discrepancy also exists between spoken conversation andliterary conversation. After a comparison between the two forms of conversations, the thesisresorts to Relevance Theory in analysis of literary conversations of The Scarlet Letter,attempting to find out whether Relevance Theory could be applied to give powerfulexplanation to the comprehension of literary conversations as well. The Scarlet Letter, on theother hand, is a novel honored as "psychological romance” with subtle psychologicaldescription, which provides rich and exquisite implicatures within the characters’conversations.Taking conversations in The Scarlet Letter for sample analysis, the thesis applies therelevance theoretic framework and "ostensive-inferential” model to analyze thecommunicative process of literary conversations. Different from spoken conversation, thereare two communicative levels simultaneously undergoing between speaker-hearer andauthor-reader in literary conversation, therefore the concepts of "Direct CommunicativeLevel” and "Indirect Communicative Level” are put forward, relatively referring to theinteraction between the fictional characterized "speaker” and "hearer”, as well as the"speaker” and the reader of the literary work. Three cases of indirect communicative levelthat could result to different communicative processes are categorized and analyzedaccordingly.Actually indirect communicative level, to a great extent, is not confined to literature,about which further illustration and discussion are made as a start of research in this field.