The Analysis Of Shaping Characters’ Personalities From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

Cooperative Principle, as a common linguistic phenomenon in the domain of pragmatics, has greatly attracted the attention of scholars at home and abroad. In daily conversations, sometimes people are not intended to express their thoughts or feelings directly, therefore, some underlying meanings beyond the literal form produce afterwards. Cooperative Principle can better explain daily conversations. Recently, researchers apply Cooperative Principle into various fields such as translation, teaching, language humor, rhetorical devices and advertisements etc. Cooperative Principle has powerful interpretation force as regards to conversational communication and provides practical approach for digging the implicature, the shaping of personalities are often fulfilled through various conversational contexts.This thesis mainly talks about the purposeful violations of Cooperative Principle from four aspects: the violation of Quality Maxim, the violation of Quantity Maxim, the violation of Relevant Maxim, the violation of Manner Maxim, which enlightens the shaping of personality. Having searched abundant related data, papers which take Cooperative Principle as framework to talk about the shaping of personalities are relatively rare. Many researchers highlight on the appreciation of its dialogues and themes in literal masterpieces. This thesis aims at exploring how the characters are gradually and naturally shaped through the analysis of conversations in House of Cards from the perspective of violation of Cooperative Principle.House of Cards is one of the most popular American TV series in its homeland and China. The core plot of this TV series is an American Congressman, leader of Whip, named Francis Underwood and his wife Claire Underwood ambitiously manipulate power in White House. The conversations in this series are explicit and impressive, modeling many vivid characters, especially the personalities of Francis which are extremely determined and greedy. The corpus in this thesis extract from conversations in House of Cards. In those papers which using House of Cards as its corpus, Turn Taking and Pragmatic Fuzziness are common found angles. Only one paper can be found which discusses House of Cards from the perspective of Cooperative Principle, the author attempts to adopt the violations of Cooperative Principle as the framework to work on shaping characters’ personalities.In terms of practical use of Cooperative Principle, the author thinks it’s necessary to analyze the pragmatic concept systematically and thoroughly. This thesis is based on the theoretical framework of the violation of Cooperative Principle, aiming to analyze the shaping of personalities in House of Cards from the perspective of Pragmatics. This thesis studies that during the whole conversations, how personalities are gradually shaped and become vivid step by step. At the end of this thesis, reflections on the applications of Cooperative Principle in shaping characters’ personalities are involved: Firstly, according to its functions in shaping personalities, discuss its realistic meaning in literature appreciation and critics. Secondly, explore the language characteristics of political conversations taking political TV series House of Cards as an example.