Personality Of Yao Mulan And Social Setting In Moment In Peking As Seen From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

Moment in Peking is a long epic novel in English about life of threefamilies in China during the transitional years between feudalism andmodernization written by the prestigious Chinese writer, translator andlinguist Mr. Lin Yutang. The protagonist of the novel is Yao Mulan, whowas a progressive young woman with beauty, wisdom, independent mindand an amount of traditional Chinese upbringing. With tactful replies andgreat language skills in conversations, the image of Yao Mulan was broughtvividly to life by Lin Yutang.In order to enable readers to better understand her personality and thesocial setting as depicted in the fiction, the author decides to study thepersonality of Yao Mulan based on an analysis of her utterances in the book,and then deduce some social meanings from the study. To be more specific,the thesis intends to set off the image of Yao Mulan and detect somesocio-cultural features embodied in her individual verbal behavior throughan analysis of her conversations in the novel from the perspective of thepragmatic theory of Conversational Implicature and Cooperative Principle.By nature the thesis is an interdisciplinary study between linguistic theoriesand literary criticism.Apart from introduction and conclusion, the body of the thesis firstgives a brief survey of the guiding pragmatic theories, relevant publicationsand some concepts or terms. Next it sets forth four hypotheses, which is thenfollowed by a close examination of selected sample dialogues to show whatCP maxims are observed or violated in each utterance and how theutterances synchronize to reveal the personality of Yao Mulan and thecustoms and ways of society at that time. In the concluding part, the thesissums up the major findings and points out that the four hypotheses have been proven valid with sufficient illustration. At the end of the thesis, thecomplementary relationship between linguistic theories and literary criticismis emphasized and suggestions are made for future research work in thisarea.