A Study Of Conversational Implicature In The Chinese Teaching Sitcom "Happy Chinese" Season I

China’s growing economic strength has attracted the world’s attention and createdan increasing enthusiasm for Chinese learning. To meet the needs of the foreigners inlearning Chinese, China Central Television (CCTV) launched a novel Chinese teachingprogram “Happy Chinese”. Taking the form of sitcom,“Happy Chinese” teaches dailyChinese expressions and relevant language points, reflects the real life and culture ofmodern China. Such new way of language teaching receives a warm applause from theChinese language learners at home and abroad. This positive audience response to“Happy Chinese” arouses the language researchers’ interests in studying it. Yet throughoutthe studies on “Happy Chinese”, there has been no study from the perspective ofconversational implicature.Under the guidance of the theory of Grice’s conversational implicature, this thesiscollects a corpus of conversational implicatures from the situational dialogues of the first50episodes of “Happy Chinese” Season I, based on Grice’s four maxims of theCooperative Principle (CP). Via content analysis of the corpus with the approaches ofquantitative and qualitative analyses, this thesis selects the typical examples from the datato study how conversational implicature is generated through violation of CP and its fourmaxims, so as to conclude the specific steps of implicature inference. From the steps ofimplicature inference, thesis points out how to use the Chinese teaching sitcom “HappyChinese” to teach Chinese to speakers of other languages particularly in the teaching ofwords’ implicatures and the context of culture, with a view to cultivating and enhancingstudents’ ability in understanding implicatures.