A CP Approach To Conversational Implicature In Fiction Dialogues-A Case Study Of Jane Austen's Emma

Criticisms and reviews on Emma, the world classic of the well known British woman writer Jane Austen, have been numerous in number and various in approaches. This thesis, as a qualitative case study, attempts to analyze the conversational implicature of dialogues in Emma by employing Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle, in order to explore the way of analyzing literary works from perspective of pragmatics.The criticisms and reviews on Jane Austen and her Emma are expounded as well as reviews on the previous studies of Cooperative Principle both at home and abroad, especially those on literary works, based on which find the necessity and feasibility of analyzing the conversational implicatures from pragmatic perspective. Then, Grice's Cooperative Principle and its related maxims are carefully expounded, which serve as theoretical framework to facilitate the conversational analysis in Emma. Grice's Cooperative Principle helps account for the relation between "sense" and "force" and explains how conversational implicature is produced and interpreted, but fails to offer the reason why people often violate the conversational maxims and employ indirectness in conveying what they really mean in the conversational interaction. Leech's Politeness Principle (PP) may be taken as a remedy for the explanation of the problem. That is why the study also borrows Leech's PP theory into the analysis..The main body of the thesis is the elaboration of the conversational implicature produced by the selected examples from Emma. The illustrations are classified into different categories in accordance with its violation of each maxims of Cooperative Principle.By exploring the conversational implicature from the approach of pragmatics in Emma, this thesis hopes the present study may contribute to a better and fuller understanding of this world classic, help shed some light on the usefulness of the pragmatic approach to the interpretation of fictions, and enrich the conventional criticism on Jane Austen.