An Analysis Of Conversational Implicature In Wuthering Heights From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

It is because of unique language styles and excellent characterization that a piece of literature work can be described as classic and last long enough but still as new as it was created.The celebrated British writer Emliy·Bront?'s Wuthering Heights is such kind of work.The characters achieve mutual communicative goals through dialogues.Therefore,it is necessary to study the fictional dialogues in this novel.The criticisms and reviews on Wuthering Heights are surveyed and the feasibility and necessity of analyzing the conversational implicatures from the pragmatics approach is thus introduced.Grice's Cooperative Principle(CP),Leech's Politeness Principle(PP)and Brown and Levinson's off-record politeness strategies are woven into the dissertation to be employed as the theoretical framework to analyze the conversational implicature in Wuthering Heights.Cooperative Principle explains how conversational implicature is derived and interpreted.Politeness Principle accounts for the reason why people choose to violate CP and adopt an indirect way to express their real intention in communication.The off-record politeness strategies illustrate distinct linguistic realizations of utterances with conversational implicature.This dissertation is a detailed analysis of conversational implicature in Wuthering Heights from the perspective of pragmatics.Based on the distinct kinds of off-record politeness strategies,the dialogues are classified into different categories.It mainly deals with these two research questions:(1)what conversational implicatures could be created by violation of maxims of CP from the selected dialogues between the main characters in the novel Wuthering Heights and the reason why they violate CP and communicate indirectly.Through analysis,it could be seen that the reason why the characters in the novel violate CP and communicate implicitly is because they want to convey a conversational implicature of being polite or to save face.The characters often express their real thoughts and feelings in a seemingly polite way by violation of CP to reduce the face damage to avoid direct conflicts or embarrassment.(2)what personalities of the main characters could be summarized from these conversational implicatures.Based on the detailed analysis of the conversational implicatures,a great number of characteristics of their personality can be concluded.The implicature of satire and detest towards Isabella,little Linton and Hareton inferred from their dialogues clearly demonstrates that Heathcliff is a man who is irascible,cruel and heartless.The implicature of jealousy and resentment against Isabella,the intensive love and hatred to Heathcliff and ignorance and indifference towards Linton reveals that Catherine is a selfish and vainglorious person.The distorted love and hatred between Heathcliff and Catherine which constitutes the central theme of this story are vividly revealed through these conversational implicatures generated in the dialogues between them.Through interpreting the conversational implicature in Wuthering Heights from the pragmatics approach,this dissertation in one way reveals the characters' different personalities at a deeper level,which makes some contribution to a better understanding of the interpretation and appreciation of the novel.In addition,it tries to enrich the traditional research on Emliy·Bront? and broaden the application of pragmatics in the field of literature.