A Pragmatic Study Of Dialogues In World War ⅡFilms

World War II is one of the most serious historical event happened in the twentieth century. In different periods of time, the war has been put onto the big screen through different way of expression by the artists all around world. In America many film directors continually produce World War II films since the war just begun to the twenty-first century of today, just as the other film directors do in all different countries. There is no denying that the contents of WWII films are turning from simple to rich. Accordingly, directors in different countries take up ways of making war stories that differ greatly from each other. The U.S. WWII films tend to dig the historical themes of the Second World War out from different perspectives:some reflect the great achievements of the U.S serviceman in the war, praise heroism and patriotism to encourage the ambitious young generations going to fight; some explore human’s deep thinking of the war, from the philosophical perspective to reveal the human civilization and humanity ravaged by war; some attempt to recreate the special moment of history, by presenting the grand scene of Word War Ⅱ. Through these films, the audiences can discover not only the brutal scenes of war， but also a show of the scenes of people:people’s different kinds of behaviors and mentalities in the war, heroes who could save the world, as well as the joys and sorrows of lives. In the war film, people’s emotions and determinations, dignities and their soul are all get exposed thoroughly because of the war. Therefore, the films of war genre have a high value to be appreciated and researched.From the angle of linguistic studies, in recent years. pragmatics and stylistics have achieved some fruitful results in application research in literary field, which mainly covers novel, poetry and drama. However, as a special form of arts, the film texts still not becomes a focus by academic interest of pragmatics and stylistics. Therefore the present thesis takes the dialogues in the films as researching material, applies the insights from pragmatics and stylistics for stylistic study of the filmic texts. With a pragmatic-stylistic approach to study and interpret the dialogues of characters in the film, it can help us profoundly understand the relationships between characters and personal language style indicated by the dialogue. The present thesis employs some basic principles and theories of pragmatics including Speech Act Theory, Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle, deixis and reference, pragmatic presupposition, pragmatic ambivalence and conversational strategies to examine the dialogues in the WWII films. A pragmatic-stylistic study of the dialogues based on the relevant theories and principles of pragmatics can distinctly reveal the character’s hidden intentions, the implied meanings of there utterances and the personal characteristics of characters.The whole thesis includes five chapters:Chapter One introduces the background, objectives, research mythology and outline of the study. Chapter Two is the literature review. It makes an overall review of researching method and relevant field of film dialogue, the contribution made by the pragmatics and stylistics studies in literature and dramatic studies. Chapter Three gives a introduction of the theoretical framework, which composed by Speech Act Theory, Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle, deixis and reference, presupposition, pragmatic ambivalence and conversational strategies. The author quotes a comprehensive use of these theories as analytical methods. Chapter Four carries out the pragmatic-stylistic analysis to the dialogues in the WWII films. Chapter Five discusses the conclusion of the whole research. It presents the main findings of the study. significance and limitations. as well as recommendations for future research.The study proves to be an effort towards a pragmatic-stylistic study of the dialogues in films, which not only describes the stylistic characters of film text. but also provides adequate methods in appreciation and interpretation of the films. Besides. regarding practical applied aspects. the present study have a significant for reference to language teaching and translation of film texts.