Analysis Of Conversational Implicature In Mansfield Park From The Cooperative Principle And The Politeness Principle

A literature work can be described as classic and last long enough but still as new as it was created, for the generations of its readers who are deeply attracted by the distinctive speech acts and the vivid characters. The English female writer Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (MP) belongs to this kind. The characters in this novel achieve mutual communicative aims through their dialogues. Therefore, it is necessary to study the fictional dialogues in this novel.The criticisms and reviews on Jane Austen and MP are surveyed and the feasibility and necessity of the conversational implicature from the pragmatic approach is thus introduced. Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP) and conversational maxims, Brown and Levinson’s off-record politeness strategies and Leech’s Politeness Principle (PP) and maxims are carefully reviewed. These three pragmatic theories are combined to serve as the theoretical framework to facilitate the conversational analysis in MP.This dissertation adopts both quantitative approach and qualitative approach to elaborate on the conversational implicature produced by the thirty three examples selected from MP. The illustrations are classified into different categories in accordance with the linguistic realization types of the off-record strategies and a comparative analysis is made. The quantitative research is employed to count the exact numbers and frequency of the utterances by flouting of the CP and the PP and summarize the common characteristics of the language in this novel; the qualitative research is undertaken to analyze how the conversational implicature is generated by violating the maxims of the CP and the PP. The characters who infringe certain conversational maxims aim to convey an implicature of being polite. In order to reduce the face damage to the hearer, the speaker always expresses his real thoughts and feelings in a seemingly polite way at the expense of the CP to avoid conflicts, embarrassment or other negative results. Overall, the conversational implicature is definite in a specific context. However, because of the differences of philosophy and background knowledge, the implicature can not always be understood. This dissertation has elaborated the generation and interpretation of conversational implicature through case analysis from the perspective of the theories above.To sum up, this study explores the conversational implicature in MP by making use of the CP and the PP. This dissertation in some ways reveals the characters’ different personalities to a deeper level, which helps audience better understand and appreciate the novel. Furthermore, the analysis in the dissertation enriches the conventional Austen studies and widens the application of pragmatics in the literature field.