Discourse Analysis Of The Conversation In The Sound And The Fury

As a discipline, Discourse Analysis (DA) has played an increasingly important role inthe study of language. It turns out that DA is an efficient approach to study language inliterary works. This thesis attempts to analyze The Sound and the Fury from the perspectiveof DA.The Sound and the Fury is the representative work of the famous American writerWilliam Faulkner. Up till now, researchers both at home and abroad have conducted variouskinds of studies on this great work. However, it is a great pity that there are few researcherswho studied this novel by analyzing the conversations from the perspective of DiscourseAnalysis. Conversations among characters in The Sound and the Fury can not only revealtheir inner world and purpose of their behavior, but also play an important role ininterpreting the development of the whole novel. Therefore, this article intends to provide anew perspective for readers to appreciate The Sound and the Fury by analyzing therepresentative conversations in details among characters in the novel.This thesis employs a synthesized model based on such approaches in DA asConversation Analysis, Speech Act Theory and the Cooperative Principle. ConversationalAnalysis is adopted to analyze the representative dialogues among characters in order tointerpret the speakers’ personalities; Speech Act Theory is applied to analyze the characters’innermost world by using different speech acts in different contexts; Cooperative Principleis employed to explain why people obey or violate Cooperative Principle in differentconversations. As the representative dialogues among characters are selected from Caddy’schildhood to adulthood, the readers can not only know the personalities and therelationships of the main characters (especially the personalities and the relationships ofCaddy and her three brothers) at different stages, but also understand the transformation ofthe main characters during the process of Caddy’s growing up.This thesis investigates the feasibility of employing DA approach to the appreciation ofthis novel, which may help shed light on the usefulness of the DA approach to theappreciation and understanding of literary works, especially novels.From what have been mentioned above, analyzing character utterances in literaturecontext from the perspectives of DA helps us comprehensively understand The Sound andthe Fury; it also investigates the feasibility of employing DA approach to appreciate literaryworks, especially novels. Furthermore, it provides s a new perspective for the research onother literary works.