Discourse Analysis Of The Conversation In Austen's Pride And Prejudice

Discourse analysis (DA), as a new discipline, is possessed of its characteristics in aspects of theoretical framework and analysis approaches. DA not only gets to the surface level of a discourse, but also goes deeper into the level of its action;it not only examines the meaning of an utterance, but also studies the process of encoding and decoding so as to perceive its social, cultural, contextual and cognitive functions. Discourse analysis is an interdisciplinary field of study and it has been applied widely to investigations in such fields as philosophy, linguistics, psychology and literary criticism.It turns out that there is no contradiction between "literary language" and "ordinary language" and it is an efficient approach to study language in English literary works by virtue of linguistic methods like DA. Since the end of 19th century, in west stylistic field, literary research has been closely associated with linguistics. Since the early of 1980s, discourse research in English fictional prose has been flourishing by western Discourse Stylistics School who has fully made use of discourse analysis models in fictional analyses such as conversation analysis model, Birmingham discourse analysis model, model based on face and politeness concepts, cooperative principle model and speech act theory model. Inspired by the research of the predecessors, my thesis aims to employ a synthesized model based on such approaches in DA as conversation analysis, speech act theory and the cooperative principle to make a study of the conversation in the fiction Pride and Prejudice (Austen 1981) to explore the personalities of the heroine Elizabeth and the hero Darcy and their relationship in specific context of situation in this novel from the perspective of discourse, and help readers with a better understanding and appreciation of the characters and their relationship at the specific stage, to probe further the enlightenment ofsystematic, scientific, effective and creative approaches in literature teaching and enlighten us on the development of students' communicative competence in practical coatexts of situation in terms of systematic and scientific approaches.