A Pragmatic Study On Conversations In Romance Of Three Kingdoms

Language is the media of literature, and just through language, literature expresses its content, its thoughts and its techniques of composition. Pragmatic theories are the principles derived from language use. So in this thesis, we combine the pragmatic theories and the study of literature works. By doing so, we can, on one hand, enlarge the scope of pragmatic study, and on the other, we can have an absolutely new perspective to study the Romance of Three kingdoms.This thesis tries to study the conversations in the Romance of Three kingdoms with such pragmatic theories as the Speech-act Theory, the Cooperative Principle and the Ostensive-Inferential Model. The Romance of Three kingdoms is a very famous classical work and occupies a very important position in Chinese literature history. Through our research we hope firstly that we can further prove the pragmatic theories have very important role in the studying and appreciating literature works; and another we can demonstrate the arguing techniques of ancient figures and thirdly we can enlarge the scope of pragmatics. The first two parts are mainly about our theory framework and literature review; including the developments of the three theories and some basic concepts as well as some researches by other people on the novel. Then we will move on to the analysis of the conversation on the perspective of Speech-act Theory. We will focus on how different types of illocutionary act are embodied in the conversations in the novel. In the following part we will discuss how conversational implicature is produced in the conversations of the novel, specifically from the angles of flouting the maxims of quantity, quality, manner and relevance. In what follows, we will talk about the Ostensive-Inferential Model in the conversations of the novel, in which we will introduce the notion of ostensive-inferential and how informative intention and communicative intention are achieved. In the last part, we will talk something about the significance and limitation as well as the future direction of the research. To draw a conclusion, in this thesis we try to study the conversations in the Romance of Three kingdoms, through which we can see how the relevant pragmatic theories work in the conversations in the novel, and we hope that our study can help to enlarge the scope of the pragmatic theories and can provide a new perspective for studying classical works.