Pragmatic Stylistic Analysis Of "Dear Life"

Dear Life is the latest work of Alice Munro who won the Nobel Prize in 2013. Aiming to advance people’s understanding of the novel, this thesis studies it from the perspective of pragmastylistics which consists of pragmatics and stylistics. Based on the previous study of pragmastylistics, we can know that many scholars always analyze novels, dramas, movies or others with cooperative principle, politeness principle and speech act theory. However, such studies fail to take the cultural, social, cognitive and other factors into consideration, which is difficult to achieve the effect of comprehensively understanding the whole text. Therefore, this thesis attempts to analyze it with the help of cooperative principle and adaptation theory which are complementary to each other. And both of the two theories are focused on semantics.Through the pragmastylistic analysis, it aims to explore the development of the plot, the characters of different people and their interpersonal relations, which help reader better understand this novel. In addition, we can find that both of the two theories can be used to analyze novels and the two theories can be well tested.