A Study On Pragmatic Ambivalence Of Utterance In Long Day's Journey Into Night From The Perspective Of Principle Of Language Economy

Pragmatic ambivalence is a common pragmatic phenomenon. Being a type of communicative strategy, it is not only applied in daily communication, but also is employed in the creation of literary works, especially in drama which is characterized by dialogues. The arbitrariness of language, vagueness of human being's thinking and uncertainty of context are regarded as the objective reasons for pragmatic ambivalence, while the Principle of Language Economy followed by human being during the process of communication is the subjective reason for pragmatic ambivalence. Usually, pragmatic ambivalence is studied based on objective reasons; however, it is seldom studied from the perspective of the Principle of Language Economy.Based on the Principle of Language Economy, the present research aims to study utterances in Long Day's Journey into Night written by Eugene O'Neill-Father of American drama. Firstly, the pragmatic ambivalence phenomena are collected, and are classified on the basis of the principle of language economy. From the perspective of speaker's economy, there are pragmatic ambivalence with double intention, pragmatic ambivalence with punny intention,pragmatic ambivalence with implied meaning and pragmatic ambivalence without noting listener's response; from the perspective of listener's economy, there are ambivalence of ignoring speaker's intention, discoursal ambivalence, ambivalence deduced by the listener and ambivalence deduced by the reader. Secondly, the present thesis concentrates on how the language economy is reflected in each type of pragmatic ambivalence under the Principle of Language Economy. Finally, this thesis chiefly analyzes different functions by different types of pragmatic ambivalence or different ways to realize language economy from the view of the speaker's and listener's economy separately.The study reveals that the ways to realize language economy in pragmatic ambivalence under the principle of speaker's economy include word substitution, ellipsis, word intimation and pragmatic presupposition, and the ways to realize language economy under the principle of listener's economy are cognitive default inference, contextual inference and emotional default inference. At the same time, the realization of language economy coincides with the generation of pragmatic ambivalence. Word substitution mainly contributes to the function of reflecting social convention, ellipsis mainly contributes to the function of foreshadowing and pushing development of plot, pragmatic presupposition mainly contributes to the function of weakening the communicative purpose, and word intimation mainly contributes to the function of strengthening the communicative purpose. In addition, cognitive default inference contributes to depicting character's inner world and creating character's personality, emotional default inference contributes to reflecting interpersonal relationship, and contextual default inference contributes to negotiating the communicative purpose.