Grice's Cooperative Principle Theory And Its Application To The Shaping Of Hamlet's Identity

Hamlet has become an unavoidable topic for readers,critics and scholars.A great number of researches on Hamlet have been done,yet further exploration is still necessary and worthy.However,among the numerous fruits which have born,linguistic research receives little attention,especially the conversational analysis of the hero Hamlet.Thus,from the perspective of pragmatics,this thesis aims to not only explore the text significance,but also provide more details about the text development for the flourishing cognitive science,so as to understand the artistic value of character portraying better.In addition to the introduction and conclusion part,this thesis is composed of three chapters.Chapter one discusses Hamlet's identity as a son-revenger and familial philosophy.In the play,Hamlet has a double identity as a son.For one thing,the death of his father and the hasty remarriage of his mother deconstruct Hamlet's identity as their son passively.Through the non-cooperation in the dialogues,Hamlet shows his complex feelings of sadness,disappointment and resentment for such misfortune.For another,the marriage between Claudius and Gertrude entitles Hamlet to be their cousin-son,an identity they both hopes to identify Hamlet.However,Hamlet shows his dislike and resistance to the forced identification by the frequent violations of Cooperative Principle,deconstructing such identity voluntarily.After learning the truth of his father's death from the Ghost,Hamlet begins to construct the identity as a revenger gradually through words and actions,but his delay leads to the final tragic end.Chapter two discusses Hamlet's identity as a lover and his tendency of misogyny.Due to the lack of maternal love and the influence of patriarchy in the current society,Ophelia is emotionally dependent on her father and brother whose pressure forces her to actively refuse and alienate Hamlet.The deconstruction of identity as her lover saddens and depresses Hamlet.Together with the influence from his mother,doubleblows prompt Hamlet,who holds pessimistic attitude towards love and even all women,to develop the tendency of misogyny.Thus,by the frequent violation of Cooperative Principle in his dialogues with Ophelia,Hamlet makes his utterances incoherent and illogic not only to achieve the purpose of feigning madness,but also to imply his bitter irony that all beautiful women are disloyal to love.Chapter three discusses Hamlet's identity as a friend and the rebellious spirits.Just as Ophelia is utilized to test whether Hamlet is mad for love,Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,Hamlet's old school friends,spy for Claudius as well.Due to their betrayal,Hamlet's identity as a friend is deconstructed accordingly.The court of Denmark has corrupted Hamlet's fundamental social relations including kinship,love and friendship and deconstructed his identities separately.Thus,in such an environment filled with murder and conspiracy,he is an outsider who hopes to rise in revolt and regenerate the imperial regime.Still,under the cover of non-cooperation in the dialogues,Hamlet expresses his anger,pain and determination for rebel indirectly,but embraces death in the end.To sum up,Hamlet's identities are deconstructed during the process of pursuing truth and revenge,and the panic,anxiety and self-denial brought by so waken him to yearn for the reconstruction of new identity.In the contradictory condition between the deconstruction of identity and need of identification,Hamlet falls into the conflict between his inner world and the environment that is implied by his violation of Cooperative Principle in the dialogues with others.This kind of conflict shapes Hamlet's character of melancholy and delay and results in the tragic end of death.