Conversational Analysis Of "Great Gatsby" Characters In Dialogue Theory

Conversation analysis is the most important area in pragmatics studies. Sacks thinks that turn-taking is an important feature in conversation. This thesis takes Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as the corpus and combines the Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory and Sacks’ turn-taking to analyze. It employs quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the character dialogue in the novel in order to reveal the meaning of character dialogue. Firstly, it analyzes the relevance of turn-taking. Secondly, it analyzes the relevance of the turn-taking systematic about character dialogue. Thirdly, it analyzes which turn-taking strategic can get the right of speech and achieve the optimal relevance. Finally, it can reveal the character changes of Gatsby, Daisy and Tom and their delicate changes of inward world. Its purpose is to promote the development of the plot and highlight the theme of the novel. Through the research, we find: first, words, phrases, sentences and compound sentences are all have relevance in the novel, which has different relevance degree. Secondly, insertion, interruption and repetition can gain the right of speech. It can achieve the optimal relevance through insertion. Thirdly, it can reveal the changes of character dialogue through the analysis of turn-taking. Therefore, this thesis interprets the novel from a linguistic point of view and open the linguistics perspective of the literacy discourse, which can build a bridge between the linguistic and the literature. This paper can provide reference for similar research.