Analysis Of Characters’ Personalities And Relations In Pride And Prejudice Under Violation Of Cooperative Principle

The Cooperative Principle (CP) was put forward by an American linguistic philosopherGrice when he gave a speech “Logic and Conversation” in Harvard University in1967. Thistheory has brought wide attention in linguistics since then. Its applied researches are mainlyreflected in the following five aspects: CP and translation, CP and teaching, CP and humors,CP and comic conversations and CP and advertisements. However, when it comes to theanalysis of conversations in literature works under CP and exploration of its literal effects,relative studies are inadequate.As the study of literature can not be isolated from linguistics, the study of linguistics cannot be excluded from highly refined literature. Therefore, the author chooses literature worksas analytical data from the angle of linguistics, attempting to combine literature andlinguistics. Specifically speaking, this paper has made an attempt to explore characters’personalities and relationships with others in Pride and Prejudice written by Jane Austen fromthe perspective of CP by means of both quantitative and qualitative methods in order toconfirm the validity of employing the pragmatic way in the analysis of literature works.Firstly, this paper introduces the main plot, researches and comments of Pride andPrejudice, and then reviews the theoretical framework: CP and its four maxims, violation ofCP and conversational implicature together with previous applied studies of this theory,especially those from the perspective of literature works. The author has selected thefollowing characters: Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Lizzie together with Collins, counted thefrequency of maxim violation in dialogues by each character respectively and verified thehypothesis that characters’ typical personalities can be reflected through four maximsviolation in dialogues with quantitative and qualitative methods. To prove that CP violationcan also display the relation between characters, the author analyzes dialogues between Lizzieand Darcy.Through the application of linguistic theory, this paper has studied conversations inliterature works to reveal characters’ personalities and relations so that readers may have abetter understanding and appreciation of Pride and Prejudice, the criticism dimensions offictions by Jane Austen will be expanded and the validity of employing linguistic theories inthe analysis of literature works is finally confirmed.