A Study Of Conversational Implicature In The Little Prince From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

The Little Prince was written by French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in 1942,which was one of the most popular fairy tales in the 20~thh century.Antoine chooses the simplest and plainest words to depict a moving and thought-provoking story,and its charm has attracted a large number of scholars to interpret the theme of the novel from the aspects of existentialism,symbolism,and aesthetics.The study chooses thirty-five dialogues from the novel The Little Prince as the research data and mainly adopts the qualitative and quantitative research method to analyze these dialogues.They are divided into four categories according to the maxims of Cooperative Principle and sub-divided by the off-record strategies each dialogue used,and finally,the personality of each character is revealed through the detailed analyzing.Through the analysis of all the thirty-five dialogues,the major findings can be concluded as follows.Firstly,the little prince,the pilot,the King,the businessman and the geographer in the novel obeys the Cooperative Principle but violates one or more than one maxim of Cooperative Principle deliberately so as to produce Conversational Implicature.In the novel,the little prince violates the relation maxim when facing the King's excessive command with the aims to,on the one hand,express his willingness to leave the planet in an indirect way,on the other hand,reduce the face threatening to the King.The pilot violates the quality maxim when explaining the planet which the little prince lives in order to satire the grown-ups who measure the value only with the number.The geographer violates the relation maxim in order to answer the little prince's question with a well-known fact.The businessman violates the quantity maxim and his potential intention is to show off his wealth.The lamplighter violates the quantity maxim to disguise the fact that he is unable to answer the little prince's doubt.Secondly,the mainly off-record strategies the characters used to violate the maxim of Cooperative Principle include:the little prince violates the maxim of Cooperative Principle by the methods of overstatement,hyperbole,giving hints and using obscure expression;the pilot violates the maxim of Cooperative Principle by the means of overstatement,hyperbole and using ambiguous words;the King violates the maxim of Cooperative Principle through overstatement,hyperbole,and prolixity;the businessman violates the maxim of Cooperative Principle by the means of overstatement and prolixity;the geographer violates the maxim of Cooperative Principle through giving association clues and prolixity;the lamplighter adopts the understatement and obscure expression to violate the maxim of Cooperative Principle.Thirdly,the personalities of the characters are revealed vividly,the little prince's images of kindness,curiosity,and responsibility are shown by violating the quantity,quality,and manner maxim.The King violates the quantity,relation,and manner maxim and shows he is blindly pursuing power.The money-oriented and conceited image of the businessman is revealed by violating the quantity and relation maxim.The geographer violates the relation and manner maxim and reveals that he is a scripted man.In the end,the pure image of children and the complicated adults are in stark contrast,so as to make the theme of the novel more clearly.It's hoped that the pragmatic approach to The Little Prince in this thesis may help readers understand the theme,plot and characters'personalities and at the same time shed some light on the usefulness of pragmatic approach to the interpretation of prose fiction in general.