A Pragmatic Analysis Of The Dialogues In The Scarlet Letter

The novel The Scarlet Letter is the masterpiece of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the well-known American writer in the19th century. Ever since its publication, it has received numerous criticisms and reviews. This paper, as an interdisciplinary study between linguistics and literature, aims to analyze in detail the dialogues in this novel from the perspective of pragmatics.The thesis first reviews the development and current situation of literary pragmatics, listing some pragmatic studies of fictional prose both at home and abroad, thus investigates the feasibility of applying pragmatic theories to analyzing the dialogues in The Scarlet Letter. Two basic pragmatic theories are adopted in the thesis:the cooperative principle or CP put forward by Paul Grice and the conversational implicature. Grice notices that in making conversation, the participants must first of all be willing to cooperate. Otherwise, it would not be possible for them to carry on the talk. Thus, the participants should obey the cooperative principle. The maxims of quantity, quality, relevance and manner in the cooperative principle are the principles that most people should abide by in their conversation. But actually these principles are often violated, which produces conversational implicature.This thesis chooses thirty-five dialogues from the novel The Scarlet Letter and employs the abovementioned pragmatic theories to analyze them in details. From the analysis of these dialogues, we can come to the following conclusions. First, the analysis of the dialogues in the Scarlet Letter has further proved that the cooperative principle and conversational implicature, the two key pragmatic theories, can be applied to analyzing not only the everyday conversations, but also the fictional dialogues. Second, the characters in the Scarlet Letter often violate one or more maxims of the cooperative principle, thus producing conversational implicature. It is these violations of the maxim that make these characters vivid and unique. Third, not all the violations of the maxims generate conversational implicature, and many dialogues between Hester and Pearl belong to this type. Hester can’t tell Pearl the truth about the scarlet letter "A" and the identity of her father. So whenever Pearl asks questions about this, she tells a lie, that is, to say something that she believes to be false. Her purpose is to make Pearl believe what she has said, and she is just making false impression. Such kind of violation of the maxim of quality does not generate conversational implicature, but misunderstanding. Fourth, the analysis of the dialogues helps us understand the characters in the novel better, grasp the plot development, reveal the inner world of the characters and the theme of the novel.It’s hoped that the pragmatic approach to The Scarlet Letter in this thesis may help to understand this world classic better and at the same time shed some light on the usefulness of pragmatic approach to the interpretation of prose fiction in general.