A Study Of Conversational Implicature In The Novel Jane Eyre From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

The Cooperative Principle (abbreviated as CP) was proposed by Americanphilosopher H. P. Grice. He believes that when people make dialogues, they have tofollow some rules. Communication requires people to cooperate with each other. Thus,he put forward CP, which includes four pragmatic maxims: the maxims of quantity,quality, relation and manner. To some extent, these maxims guarantee thatcommunications can be conducted smoothly. The theory, Conversational Implicature(abbreviated as CI)，is closely related to CP. Grice supposed that when people talkwith others, they may violate one or several maxims of CP, thus producing theimplication beyond literal sense. After him, Leech and Brown&Levinson proposedtheir politeness theory，Austin and Searle put forward Speech Acts as the supplementsto the CP principle.Jane Eyre attracts great popularity from generation to generation, written byBritish authoress Jane Austin. Ever since its publication in1847, it has never ceased tobe widely admired for its great plots, its vivid characterization and its fidelity to life.So many researchers have done analysis and study about Jane’s personalities throughthe window of feminism. This study tries to intensively analyze the personalities ofJane Eyre from perspective of Conversational Implicature so as to strengthen thecomprehension of this novel. This thesis, employing Grice’s cooperative principle,Leech’s and Brown&Levinson’s politeness theory and Austin’s and Searle’s speechact theory, takes the dialogues in Jane Eyre as example to analyze conversations inEnglish, trying to account for why people violate the cooperative principle and revealhow people use politeness and face theory in their communication by speaking. Thatwill be helpful for the researcher and hearer to comprehend others’ conversationalimplicature during their communication when they violate the cooperative principleand learn how to behave well in conversation.There are two research questions in this thesis:(1) what the conversationalimplicatures can be created by violating the maxims of the cooperative principle fromthe main characters’ dialogues in the novel Jane Eyre?(2) from the conversational implicatures, what personalities of Jane Eyre can be concluded? This thesis employstwo approaches—both quantitative approach and qualitative approach. The former isadopted to list the proportion and the detailed number of all the kinds of violationsand thus to conclude the general features of Jane’s character in this novel. The latter isused to study how CI is inferred through violating maxims of CP. The thesis mainlyuses the descriptive and explanatory analysis of the qualitative approach.This thesis is important from the perspective of theory and practice. From onepoint of view, it gives some inspirations for applying CP and CI to do researches oncommunication language and enriches the pragmatic theory connected with novels.From another point of view, it contributes a little bit to the understanding of languageand culture in this novel and maybe a little helpful for the people who learn English.