A Study Of Dialogues From The Perspective Of Conversational Implicature Theory

As a classic work in modern Chinese literature, Fortress Besieged has attractedgreat attentions from scholars both home and abroad since it was published. There aremany studies on the classic work, however, studies on the conversational implicaturefrom the perspective of linguistics are relatively few. This thesis aims to provide adetailed analysis of the conversational implicature of the dialogues in FortressBesieged from the perspective of pragmatics, especially from Gricean ConversationalImplicature Theory and Cooperative Principle.The thesis first takes a look at the current studies and development on FortressBesieged, Gricean Conversational Implicature Theory and Cooperative Principle bothhome and abroad, holding the view that the pragmatic theories can be used to analyzethe literary works which provides a new perspective to study novels and can revealsome factors that other literary theories are not totally involved. Then, the thesismakes a deep and detailed analysis of Gricean Conversational Implicature Theory andCooperative Principle, providing a strong theoretical support and research tool for thestudy of dialogues in Fortress Besieged.The author finds that sometimes the characters in Fortress Besieged do notexpress their views and feelings directly, on the contrary, they adopt an indirect wayto express themselves which can generate the implicature and to let the hearers guesswhat their real intention is. In general, the implicature of the speaker is definite underthe special context and situation, however, because of some other factors, such as thecontext, the shared knowledge between the speaker and the hearer, and the ideas ofboth sides, the implicature may not be totally understood. The thesis selects a lot ofdialogues from Fortress Besieged and conducts a detailed analysis of the dialogueswith Gricean Conversational Implicature Theory and Cooperative Principle, hopingthat the readers can have a much better grasp of the implicature and have a betterappreciation of the work. Besides, the thesis classifies the conversational implicature according to the ways of violating the maxims of Cooperative Principle and makes aninterpretation on the functions of the conversational implicature in Fortress Besieged.Through the analysis of the implicature, we can have a better understanding of thetheme of Fortress Besieged, which is helpful for us to appreciate Mr. Ch’ien’s talentand profound thought.