An Analysis Of Conversational Implicature Of Dialogues In Two Broke Girls From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

How to use language properly to illustrate our underlying meanings in a social context has received considerable attention from linguists. In Logic and Conversation, Grice put forward that people observe certain communicative principles in their social communications, which make them better understand each other’s meanings and exchange s+ccessfully. Based on that, Grice proposed Cooperative Principle and its related four maxims which are quantity maxim, quality maxim, relation maxim and manner maxim. Later it has become the core content of pragmatics and has been a significant principle to guide people’s communications. It has gained great approval from linguists at home and abroad. In Grice’s opinion, in a normal verbal communication, the Cooperative Principle and its four maxims are always observed, because once they are violated, two speakers cannot communicate absolutely. Thus to some extent, the principle and its four maxims guarantee that people can communicate smoothly in their daily life. However, people find that we often violate the four maxims, and then our underlying meanings can become clearer. That is to say, people may violate the four maxims when they are observing the Cooperative Principle, and it can bring an important effect on communicative meanings. Therefore, conversational implicature occurs. With the development of pragmatics at home and abroad, the study of conversational implicature is becoming more extensive, and more and more people realize its importance.The film Two Broke Girls is popular with people at home and abroad because of its easily understood theme, the simply designed characters and precise dialogues. In recent years, there are many scholars that make specific analyses and discussions from the perspective of semantics, rhetoric, phonetics, pragmatics and others. From the perspective of pragmatics, based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its related theories, with the contexts and the dialogues in Two Broke Girls, how the conversational implicature is created by flouting the four maxims in Cooperative Principle by actors in the film is analyzed in the thesis. Lead the audiences to know and analyze the plot through contexts and Cooperative Principle and its related theories, and make them better understand what the director wants to say.The innovation of the thesis is that it is based on the analysis of the current study of conversational implicature at home and abroad, and from the perspective of pragmatics, applying the Cooperative Principle, conversational implicature and their related theories, with the dialogues and contexts in this film, and making use of the film Two Broke Girls as a corpus to analyze the cases. The thesis makes a discourse analysis of dialogues among actors in the film, make the whole meaning of the conversation be understood with real instances, and thus the hearers can infer the underlying meaning from the superficial level. In a word, the final purpose is to show that speakers express their underlying meaning by flouting the maxims under the Cooperative Principle.The thesis is made up of three parts, an introduction, a main body and a conclusion.The first part is the introduction to the thesis. It mainly introduces the origin, development and the applied field of the Cooperative Principle.The second part is the main body of the thesis, consisting of five chapters.The first chapter is the literature review, including the specific presentation of the theories of the Cooperative Principle and conversational implicature, and the brief introduction to the TV series Two Broke Girls. The part of the Cooperative Principle contains the elaboration of previous studies on it at home and abroad, the concrete exposition of the four maxims under the Cooperative Principle, which are the quantity maxim, quality maxim, relation maxim and manner maxim. This part also discusses the generation of conversational implicature by flouting the four maxims mentioned above. The part of conversational implicature is comprised of the simple explanation of the theory and the classification and characteristics of it.In the second chapter, the conversational implicature of the dialogues in the TV series Two Broke Girls is specifically analyzed by flouting the maxim of quantity in the ways of providing more or less information. In principle, in order to make the conversation smoothly carry on, speakers and hearers ought to observe the maxim of quantity by offering enough information However, in the actual conversation, people always violate the maxim of quantity and convey their conversational implicature. Speakers provide more or less information than what hearers require to express their implied meaning. Only when hearers understand speakers’ underlying meaning can the communication be carried on well.The conversational implicature of the dialogues in the TV series Two Broke Girls is analyzed in the third chapter by flouting the maxim of quality by means of using the figures of speech-metaphor, irony and hyperbole. The characters in the TV series convey their conversational implicature in the three ways. Only when hearers understand speakers’ underlying meaning can the communication be carried on well.In the fourth chapter the conversational implicature of the dialogues in the TV series Two Broke Girls is analyzed in detail by flouting the maxim of relation in the ways of offering hints and clues. The characters in the TV series flout the maxim of relation by providing the information which is irrelevant to their topic. Hearers can get their real meaning through rigorous analyses.In the fifth chapter the author specifically analyzes the conversational implicature of the dialogues in the TV series Two Broke Girls by flouting the maxim of manner by means of using obscure words, ambiguous, prolix and disordered sentences. The characters flout the maxim of manner through the four ways, and hearers can understand speakers’ implied meaning by figuring out why they deliberately flout the manner maxim.The third part is the conclusion of the thesis. It mainly summarizes and generalizes the previous exposition. By analyzing the dialogues of the characters in Two Broke Girls, the thesis confirms that the Cooperative Principle and conversational implicature theory have an important position in linguistics and they also exert a profound influence on language communication. The author also presents the contributions and limitations of the thesis, and some suggestions of the future study.