The Study Of Conversational Implicature In Jane Austen's Sense And Sensibility

Jane Austen is one of the few famous English female novelists in the 19th century, She has completed six classical novels in all her life time, in which Sense and Sensibility is one of them. Studies on Sense and Sensibility are numerous. In the novel, Austen's view about marriage, her attitude toward sense and sensibility, the application of feminism criticism in her works and her language styles as well as narrative skills are widely studied by scholars at home and abroad. While people seldom study the conversational implicature systematically to appreciate the characters'conversation of this novel, and on this analyze the characters personalities as well as explore the writer's writing motives. And this thesis is such a kind of try.Conversation, in literature creation, is a basic material and method to establish character's image. In the creation of the characters'conversation, Austen on one hand exerts dialogue to depict the characters'image, on the other hand does well in utilizing the different motives and understandings between speakers, listeners and readers, producing. polysemy Based on this, the conversation is full of meaning, individuality, vividness, as a result, afford for people's thought. So, this thesis tries to apply the Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle to make a detailed analysis on the abundant Conversational Implicature in Sense and Sensibility.The author discovered that characters in Sense and Sensibility always violate the regularities to generate more than what is said, that is, they employ indirect expression to produce conversational implicature. Gricean conversational implicature theory and Cooperative Principle, Leech's Politeness Principle are right to interpret the generation and understanding of these specific examples'implicature. The characters often infringe certain conversational maxims and generate implicatures. And one of the reasons is that they are considering using politeness tactic between various conversational partners of different social status. To abide the communicative etiquette, the speaker usually applies the seeming polite linguistic forms, expressing his true ideas and feelings implicitly. Thus it can avoid of conflict, embarrassment and many bad results directly. The speaker's conversational implicature is certain in a given occasion and he hopes the listeners can understand his implied meaning. However, because of the context and the different beliefs as well as background knowledge of the two sides, the conversational implicature can't be understood comprehensively.According to the politeness tactic in the realization of linguistic form, this thesis analyzes and classifies some classic conversations of the characters'in Sense and Sensibility by means of Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and rhetoric. Gricean Cooperative Principle is divided into four maxims: the maxim of quantity, the maxim of quality, the maxim of relevance and the maxim of manner. The author thinks meiosis and hyperbole are produced because the speaker infringes the quantity maxim, which is that his information is less than what is needed in the current conversation or his information is much more than what is needed in the current conversation. Irony, metaphor and rhetoric question are caused by the speakers'violation of quality maxim, which he deliberately speaks something that is illusive and lack of evidence. The relevance maxim requires the speaker says something that is relevant to the topic. Otherwise the speaker will be regarded as giving hints or associated clues purposely. The last maxim, manner maxim which if the speaker disobeyed, his words will be obscure, ambiguous or vague and fail to be orderly, brief or succinct.This thesis utilizes the conversational implicature theory of Grice Cooperative Principle and Leech's Politeness Principle to analyze some rhetoric pattern in the conversation of Sense and Sensibility in the hope of exploring the characters'personality as well as Jane Austen's writing skill, from which the author's writing motives and the social phenomenon are reflected at that time.