A Study Of Conversational Implicatures In The Dialogues Of American Television Series From The Perspectives Of Cooperative Principle And Face Theory

Pragmatics, as a branch of linguistics, basically studies language in use. For a long time, pragmatics mainly focuses on the study of speech communication in real life, and conversely, the pragmatic research on dialogues in literary works with film and TV works is relatively lacking. In the 1970s, some scholars was in an attempt to connect literature with pragmatic theories, which gave birth to a new subject entitled Literary Pragmatics. At first, some pragmatic theories are applied to analyze literary works, but then with the prosperity of film and TV industries, they are employed to film and television works. American sitcom Mom was broadcast on CBS TV in 2013, and so far in China, the linguistic study on Mom is relatively rare and the pragmatic research is less as well.The language philosopher Grice believes that in daily conversations, interlocutors are willing to cooperate so as to achieve effective communication, so they are supposed to abide by what he calls Cooperative Principle. However, sometimes speakers are inclined to flout Cooperative Principle for some reasons and express their true intentions indirectly, then in that way hearers have to infer speakers'connotations under the context, and the implicit meaning is considered as conversational implicature. What's more, from the standpoints of face and face-threatening acts, Brown and Levinson further explore politeness strategies among which off-record strategies are considered to be more widely used in interaction. Based on Grice's Conversational Implicature Theory and Brown and Levinson's Face Theory, this paper takes characters' dialogues from Mom's first two seasons as the source data, analyzes that when the speaker may cause face damage to the listener, he or she has to breach Cooperative Principle by utilizing the off-record politeness strategy to generate conversational implicatures, and finally summarizes pragmatic functions of those conversational implicatures.The thesis adopted the qualitative research method to analyze the conversational implicatures of characters'dialogues from Season One to Season Two of Mom, and explained the whole process from conversational implicature's definition, generation and inference to selection and classification to pragmatic functions, aiming at provide a reference for the relevant research on film and TV works. In addition, the study again proved that the maintenance of conversation participants'face is one of the important reasons for the exploitation of Cooperative Principle and that off-record politeness strategies can effectively reduce the face-threatening acts. To summarize, this thesis is in the intent of helping those non-English-speaking audience have a better appreciation of original English film and TV works, understand conversational implicatures of characters'dialogues and experience the real communication effect. Meanwhile, the study is conducted to guide the audience to convey their true intentions by employing the off-record politeness strategies, thus enhancing the communication effect and advancing the competence and performance of speech communication, especially in the cross-cultural communication.