An Analysis Of The Conversational Implicature In The Importance Of Being Earnest Based On The Cooperative Principle

As an important component of linguistics, pragmatics has aroused great interestsfrom scholars both at home and abroad since the1970s, which consists of manyfamous theories in which the Conversational Implicature Theory and CooperativePrinciple play an important role. More and more scholars apply these theories intovarious language research fields to make the communication smoother and morefluent. This thesis tries to analyze the conversational implicature in The Importance ofBeing Earnest written by Oscar Wilde from the perspective of pragmatics with theCooperative Principle and off-record strategies as the theoretical framework.Previous criticisms and researches on The Importance of Being Earnest, and thetheories adopted, especially those related with literature, have been reviewedrespectively. It is found that analyzing this drama from pragmatics is feasible andnecessary, for the author found few scholars apply pragmatic theory into the analysisof drama, especially The Importance of Being Earnest in which there are greatquantities of dialogues. Then the elaboration on Grice’s Cooperative Principle and15off-record strategies are introduced. As the theoretical foundations, CooperativePrinciple and its sub-maxims explain how the conversational implicature is generatedand interpreted; the15off-record strategies are the ways of generating implicature,adopted by the speaker in order to do the Face Threatening Acts to the hearerindirectly.The main body of this thesis is the case analysis of the conversationalimplicature in The Importance of Being Earnest. Thirty-four conversations areselected from the drama and are classified further into different categories based onthe maxims of Cooperative Principle and15off-record strategies. People prefer tospeak skillfully in their daily communication through different language strategies, inorder to avoid the direct conflicts and remain harmonious relations. In this drama,characters take various strategies to convey what they really want to say implicitlyincluding overstatement, being vague, giving associations, and so on, in order to avoiddoing Face Threatening Acts directly. With the help of the analysis on the basis of pragmatic theories, this paper aimsto help the readers have a better appreciation of the irony and humor hidden inbetween the lines, a clearer insight into the author’s moral view and the socialphenomenon, a keener awareness of the personalities of the characters produced bythe author. What is more, the paper hopes to be helpful to the future research on OscarWilde’s works, and provide the linguistic researchers with reference as a caseanalysis.