"the Merchant Of Venice" Dialogue Pragmatic Analysis

As a special type of literature, drama is made up of plots and dialogues. The dialogues between characters in drama can not only reveal their inner world and purpose of their behavior, but also play an important role in pushing the development of the whole play. Therefore, dialogues in drama are attracting the attention of many scholars not only in literature, but also in linguistics. This thesis intends to analyze the dialogues between characters in The Merchant of Venice in details on the basis of the pragmatic theories in order to provide a new perspective for readers to appreciate literature contexts.The Merchant of Venice, written by William Shakespeare, is a famous and classic drama in English literature. It has profound influence both in Britain and the whole world. The dialogues between the successful characters, such as kind Antonio, wise Portia and greedy Shylock, portray the personalities of the characters and reveal the implied theme of the play.Few Scholars study characters'utterances in the drama from the perspective of pragmatics, although lots of scholars have studied them in traditional literature ways. Therefore, this thesis will analyze the dialogues between characters using the principles of pragmatics. In this thesis, Austin and Searle's Speech Act Theory is applied to analyze why the characters do not express themselves directly and what the illocutionary act is; Grice's conversational implicature is employed to explain why people go against Cooperative Principle in the drama and how conversational implicature comes into being; Leech's Politeness Principle is used to study why people speak in an indirect way and how they protect themselves; Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory is applied to show how characters make efforts to communicate successfully in certain contexts; Levinson's Three Principles are employed to analyze characters'generalized conversational implicature. Thus, the readers can not only understand the theme and the historical background of this drama better, but also deeply realize the fact that Shylock is both repulsive and deserving sympathy through the pragmatic analyses of characters'utterances. From what have been mentioned above, analyzing characters'utterances in literature context from the perspectives of pragmatics helps us understand Shakespeare's drama comprehensively. The thesis also investigates the feasibility of employing pragmatic approaches to the appreciation of drama, and reveals the linguistic art of literature works. Furthermore, it supplies a new horizon for the research into other literature works.