Influence Of Social Classes On Verbal Strategies From Perspectives Of CP And PP

A Tale of Two Cities is a masterpiece of Charles Dickens, which was published in1859. The story was under the background of French Revolution. Charles Dickens exposed what the feudal nobles had done to the poor laborers and denounced their exploits and oppression. For this reason, there are a lot of conversations between people of different social status, which offers the author of the thesis a good chance to study whether social status will influence the way of speaking or not.The pragmatic theories like Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Leech’s Politeness Principle are used to analyze the conversations of people from different social status in the novel. Grice’s cooperative principle is committed to the relationship between literal meaning and implicit meaning and interprets how conversational implicature is generated and understood, while Leech’s politeness principle accounts for explaining that speakers prefer to express their real intention in an indirect way out of politeness.This thesis elucidates conversations chosen from the novel A Tale of Two Cities with CP and PP integrated as the theoretic framework. The illustrations are seperated into different categories according to the flouting of the four maxims of the cooperative principle and different types of the off-record politeness strategies. The characters in the novel flout certain conversational maxims and adopt off-record politeness strategies in order to indirectly convey conversational implicature and real intention.The specific research questions are as follows:1.Will social classes affect the choices of verbal strategies in communication?2.1f yes, how do social classes show differences in flouting the maxim of cooperative principle and observing the maxims of politeness principle in communication?This thesis extracts all the conversations from the main male characters, and the selected conversations all contain some conversational implicature in them. The thesis categorizes all the conversations according to how they flout the maxim of Cooperative Principle and follow the maxim of Politeness Principle, analyze all the collected data in the research and then lead to a conclusion. The division of different social classes is done according to the classification standards put forward by Werner.Through the research, it is found that different social classes may affect the use of verbal strategies in communication. As far as the upper class is concerned, in daily communication, the upper class use the verbal strategy of flouting the maxim of manner more frequently than other maxims; although upper-middle class and lower-middle class display some differences in their choices of verbal strategies, they, as a whole, flout the maxim of manner more often by intentionally disobeying the principle of being brief and perspicuous. However, the flouting of the maxim of manner by the middle class is more frequent than by the upper class. In addition, the middle class people also like flouting the maxim of quality; when it comes to the lower class, though, in communication, the upper-lower class and lower-lower class display some differences, they, as a whole, flout more often the maxims of quality and quantity. In other words, they tend to say something false and contribute less information than others need. It is also discovered through the research that different social classes show some differences in their observance of the maxims of politeness principle in their communication. The first three maxims most often observed by the upper class people are the maxim of approbation, the maxim of agreement and the maxim of generosity, though the upper-upper class and the lower-upper class may vary a little bit. Compared with the upper class, the middle class people tend to use the verbal strategies of following the maxim of approbation and the maxim of modesty. The percentages of the observance of these two maxims by the middle class are higher than by the upper class. The next frequently used maxims are the tact maxim and generosity maxim; among the lower class people, the maxim most frequently observed is the maxim of sympathy, followed by the maxim of agreement.The significance of this study lies in the fact that it is the first attempt to analyze the conversational implicatures in the conversations between major characters in A Tale of Two Cities from the angle of CP and PP, which contributes to a better understanding of influence of social classes on the choice of verbal strategies. In addition, the previous studies on A Tale of Two Cities are mainly from the perspectives of literature, translation, gender, personalities, etc, few of which combine cooperative principle and politeness principle with the social factor of social class, therefore, this study, to some extent, supplements the previous researches on conversational implicatures. Finally, this study helps language learners deepen their understanding of cooperative principle and politeness principle, raise their awareness of such a social factor as social classes and communicate with each other appropriately.