Analysis Of Characters In Pride And Prejudice From The Perspective Of Fuzzy Language

Fuzziness is an important characteristic of any natural language and fuzzy expressions are widely used both in people’s daily communications and literary works. Since the first time the concept of fuzziness was proposed in linguistic field, the phenomenon has drawn much attention and been the focus of linguistic studies for quite a long time. Most of researches in the early stage are concentrating on the origin, definition and classification of fuzzy language. With the development of the whole theoretical system, gradually more and more scholars are trying to associate fuzziness theories with studies in other linguistic fields such as translation, teaching, lexicography, and artificial intelligence. The practical value of fuzziness in analyzing problems in other language fields is showing its significance. However, what has been done is far from enough.Though previous studies lay a solid foundation for further discussions, the author finds that most of the thoughts tend to be on theoretical level. Some scholars do notice the practical value of fuzziness, but it is the pragmatic fuzziness that they pay attention to, while the practical value of semantic fuzziness is often ignored. As to the studies that combine fuzzy theory with literary works, scholars usually concentrate on the translation tactics. For example, they will study tactics that can convey the beauty of fuzziness from one language to another language. The relationship between fuzzy language and characters in literary works are not fully discussed. The thesis will study on practical value of fuzzy language in appreciation of Pride and Prejudice from a new perspective.Literature is the art of language. The expressions in literary works often have rich implicatures and distinctive styles. Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice is an excellent representative in this aspect. The novel pictures the normal family life of middle class in Britain in the18th century. The main topic of it is love and marriage. Restricted by such a topic, the development of plots mainly depends on dialogues. Multitude conversations in the novel not only forcefully drive the development of the story but also build vivid characters. The novel’s humorous tone and ironic language style make the novel funny and attractive. The skillful use of fuzzy language helps a lot to achieve such an effect.The thesis manages to make clear the practical use of fuzzy language in the appreciation of literary works under the guidance of some linguistic theories. The thesis chooses Jane Austen’s description of some main characters and the dialogues between these characters as examples. It attempts to find out the relationship between fuzziness and characters from the perspectives of semantic fuzziness and pragmatic fuzziness. The selected examples include words, phrases, sentences and utterances. Through analyzing the use of fuzzy expressions in the examples, the thesis proves the value of fuzzy language. The explanations of such skills—how fuzzy language is employed to portray the characters and how readers can figure out the characters’ personalities by understanding the implicatures of their vague utterances—will help readers learn more about the novel as well as the characters.Under the guidance of the related linguistic theories, the author uses the qualitative method to complete the research hypothesis with a few examples. The thesis proves that the theory of fuzzy language is suitable to be applied to literature studies. The master of fuzzy language is beneficial for us to have a deeper and more scientific interpretation of literary works.In analyzing semantic fuzziness, the thesis adopts Leech’s classification of associative meanings to find out in what way semantic fuzziness influences the expressions. The associative meaning includes:connotation meaning, affective meaning, reflected meaning, social meaning and collocative meaning. The existence of associative meaning reflects that in different contexts, words have different meanings, thus the semantic meanings of words are fuzzy. The contexts mentioned here include macroscopic historical background as well as specific events. The semantic meaning of the word varies in different contexts and thus reflects speakers’ personality. Then the thesis studies pragmatic fuzziness with a series of pragmatic theories. The author lists some utterances that violate the cooperative principle and finds that when the principle is not observed, the conversational implicature occurs. Different understandings of conversational implicature are just the cause and manifestation of linguistic fuzziness. With face-saving strategies, conversational implicature can be properly explained and the motivations of speakers’violation of cooperative principle are thus revealed. With a detailed analysis, the author reveals the true intention of the speakers and sums up some main characters’personalities based on the analysis.The thesis creatively applies the theory of fuzzy language to the appreciation of literary works. Apart from that, there is another point worth mentioning-not only the pragmatic fuzziness, but also the semantic fuzziness is discussed from a dynamic approach in the thesis. The author fully realizes the importance of contexts in understanding the fuzzy language. She holds the opinion that semantic meanings of words change flexibly according to different contexts. Because fuzzy language shows the characters’dedicate psychological states and emotions, it is better than those words, phrases, and sentences that have accurate meanings in terms of delivering implied meanings. This is the practical value of fuzzy language shown in the study.The thesis has five chapters. The first one gives a short introduction including the sources, significance and organization of the thesis. Then the author reviews previous studies related on fuzziness home and abroad in chapter two. The literature review is divided into two parts:studies on semantic fuzziness home and abroad and studies on pragmatic fuzziness home and abroad. The author classifies and summaries these researches according to their contents. Chapter three and chapter four are two most important parts in the thesis. In these chapters the author expresses her view of the role fuzzy language plays in the appreciation of the novel with a few examples selected from Pride and Prejudice. In the last chapter, the author summaries the whole thesis, points out the limitations of it and gives suggestions accordingly.On the one hand, the thesis verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of using fuzzy language to analyze the characters in the novel. On the other hand, it offers a new possible study direction for researches of fuzzy language. Combing fuzzy language with studies in other fields, and shifting the study focus from the theoretical value of fuzzy language to its pragmatic usage is very important. We should consider the meaning of fuzzy language in a specific context from a dynamic approach. This study method will make our studies of fuzzy language and studies in other fields more reasonable and profound. The author hopes that the conclusions in this thesis can be generalized, and will be useful to be applied to the successive studies in linguistic or other related fields.