A Study On Conversational Implicature In Desperate Housewives From The Perspective Of The Cooperative Principle

The American linguistic philosopher Grice proposed the significant and far-reaching "Conversational Implicature Theory" in the lecture at Harvard University in1967. Grice believes that the real Conversational Implicature is the theory that studies about the real implication of communications and explains the implicature of conversations. It is not simply to study the meaning of language expressing itself from the language internal system (phonetics, grammar, semantics, etc.) but through the context and the relevance of context and discourse. When the two parties in communication show their certain willingness of cooperation and try to make them work, Grice calls it cooperative principle. In recent years, with the development of Pragmatics and deeper research, people have made the research about the influence on conversational implicature in depth. Especially the study of Conversational Implicature from the perspective of corpus, it has been one of the hot spots in recent years and has been paid much attention to by language researchers. With the rapid development of domestic and overseas foreign language learning, the Conversational Implicature research scope and application has been wider and wider. Development of the research of Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature Theory has derived from theory in the original books to study of characters’languages in novels, dramas, TV works and talk shows, which can make a great contribution to the readers to help them get a deeper and better understanding of the author’s intention in the conversation.The creative point in this paper is taking Desperate Housewives as the studying corpus to analyze the real cases. The study of corpus is based on the analysis of overseas and domestic research of Conversational Implicature. It is proposed based on Cooperation Principle, Conversational Implicature etc. as the theoretical foundation from the pragmatic angle. It has combined the relations between Conversational Implicature and language environment, implied analogy, literature works. Through the analysis of dialogues between characters in the drama and discussion about the comprehension of the whole semanteme in communications, the listeners could get through the ostensible meaning to the deeper intention. So the real intention of the speaker violating the Cooperative Principle can be found.This paper includes six parts. Chapter One is the introduction to the paper. It introduces the researching background, purpose and structure of the paper. Chapter Two reviews the research status and limitation of conversational implicature study at home and abroad based on the point of Pragmatics. Chapter Three is the theoretical basis of the paper. It systematically introduces the Conversational Implicature and Cooperative Principle, including the meaning theory of Conversational Implicature in pragmatics. Chapter Four mainly tells about the practical application of Cooperative Principle and introduces the abiding and violation to Cooperative Principle in daily life separately. The examples of violating cooperative principle in Desperate Housewives are taken to analyze the conversational implicature in Chapter Four. Chapter Five represents the five features of Conversational Implicature and illustrates with the corpus in Desperate Housewives. Chapter Six learns on the inspiration of how to further understand conversational implicatures in drama works and reveals the crucial relationship between conversational implicature and the current language environment, implied analogy, literature works. The last chapter is the conclusion. In this paper, the discourse structure of Desperate Housewives is particularly analyzed and the theory of both linguistics and pragmatics are combined to make up for each other. Thus, the exhaustive comprehension of the whole discourse, the information and communicative value in discourse are revealed. It is expected that this research subject would bring some benefit to the foreign language teaching and studying in both theory and practice.