A Pragmastylistic Analysis Of Murder In The Cathedral

Modern stylistics which brings linguistics and literature together has had a history of more than one hundred years. It has had quite a number of sub-disciplines, such as formalist stylistics, functional stylistics, cognitive stylistics, pragmatic stylistics, etc. Stylistics uses linguistic theory to analyze literature.As one of the three genres in literature (the other two are poetry and novel), drama is ignored by many scholars in criticism compared with the hot study of the other two genres. Within the genre of drama, fewer scholars pay attention to the verse drama which is written in blank verse.Drama is composed by the discourse in action. Pragmastylistics, as a sub-discipline of stylistics, blends stylistics with pragmatics. It is a discourse-oriented approach. There has been little study of this type of drama from a linguistic point of view. In this thesis the theory of pragmatic stylistics will be applied to the analysis of Eliot's poetic drama, Murder in the Cathedral in order to draw people's attention to pragmastylistics and Eliot's verse drama.The theories of pragmastylistics in this thesis will include Geoffrey Leech's interpersonal rhetoric, also his Politeness Principle, and Herbert Paul Grice's Cooperative Principle. The play's communication can be divided into two levels: the micro-level of communication (communication in the play) and the macro-level of communication (communication of the play). The thesis will focus on the analysis of these two levels of communication with the application of the Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle. And the violation and observance of the two principles will be one of the main concerns in the interpersonal and rhetorical analysis. Meanwhile, the interpersonal relationships in Murder in the Cathedral will also be covered in the thesis.As the title of this thesis suggests, the pragmastylistic features of the drama should be the main concern here. There is still the other point that deserves the attention of this thesis, that is, the poetic features of Murder in the Cathedral. Since this drama is written in blank verse, it is necessary for the thesis to analyze the text with Leech's theory of poetic stylistics. This means that deviation and parallelism in the play will be analyzed, their roles in strengthening the theme of the play constantly being kept in view.