| Oliver Twist, a classical novel written by the British writer Charles Dickens, ispopular with readers since its publication. Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist is a classicalliterature work in the history of English literature. Dickens is a famous British criticalrealism novelist in the19thcentury. His Oliver Twist reflects the complex social realityat that time, which has made an outstanding contribution to the exploration anddevelopment of English critical realism literature.The thesis has reviewed the literature research of the19thcentury and the modernand contemporary century about Charles and his Oliver Twist. Most researches onOliver Twist pay much more attention to the literature translation and translationtheories. Few have done any research on conversational implicature. Therefore, it isfeasible and necessary to explore the conversational implicature in Oliver Twist fromthe perspective of pragmatic theories. The thesis attempts to analyze the conversationalimplicature in the novel from the perspective of the Cooperative Principle inpragmatics, using the qualitative method of case analysis, in order to provide a newangle for the study of characters’ utterances in literary works.There are a lot of conversations in the way of indirect expressions. Characters inthe novel always violate the regularities to generate more than what is said and toproduce conversational implicature. A large number of dialogues of typical and indirectexpression have been selected and the conversational implicatures in the fiction havebeen analyzed in detail through Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its maxims. We canclassify the illustrations into different categories according to the linguistic realizationtypes of the off-record strategies. The characters in the fiction violate the maxims andits sub-maxims on purpose on the basis of obeying the Cooperative Principle in order toconvey their potential and real intention. The thesis attempts to analyze conversationalimplicature from the perspective of violating the Cooperative Principle, which is thereal intention that the characters in the fiction wants to convey.The thesis consists of an introduction, the main body and a conclusion. The maincontents are as follows:The first part is the introduction, which mainly introduces the origin of the Cooperative Principle and the development of the Cooperative Principle at home andabroad and the application field of the Cooperative Principle. Then it briefly introducesCharles Dickens and his representative work Oliver Twist. According to the currentstudy of Oliver Twist, the thesis analyzes the conversational implicature in Oliver Twistfrom a new angle-the Cooperative Principle.The second part is the main body, which is composed of the following fivechapters.Chapter One is a literature review. It mainly introduces that how theconversational implicature is put forward. Then it introduces the definition ofconversational implicature, the classification of conversational implicature and theproperties of conversational implicature. Finally it points out the theoretical frameworkof the thesis and then introduces the Cooperative Principle and its four maxims, andviolation of the Cooperative Principle in detail.Chapter Two mainly analyzes the conversational implicature in Oliver Twistgenerated by violating the maxim of quantity through providing too little or too muchinformation. In the normal communication between dialogues, the speaker should obeythe quantity maxim of the Cooperative Principle so that the communication can becontinued smoothly. However, the characters in the fiction always violate the quantitymaxim to produce the implication of the utterance. They provide too much or too littleinformation to interfere with the smooth development between dialogues to express theimplication of the utterance that the speaker wants to convey. Only if the listenerrealizes and understands the speaker’s implication, the expected communication effectscan be achieved.Chapter Three mainly analyzes the conversational implicature in Oliver Twistgenerated by violating the maxim of quality through irony, metaphor, hyperbole andusing rhetorical questions which belong to rhetorical methods. By means of the fourways, the characters in Oliver Twist always violate the quality maxim of theCooperative Principle and provide the untrue or false information. If the listenerunderstands the reason why the speaker violates the quality maxim on purpose, he canacquire the real intention that the speaker wants to express. Chapter Four mainly analyzes the conversational implicature in Oliver Twistgenerated by violating the maxim of relation through giving hints and giving associatedclues. The characters in the fiction violate the relation maxim of the CooperativePrinciple and provide the information of the utterance that is irrelevant to the topic.Therefore, the listener will analyze the reason why the speaker violates the relationmaxim and the real intention that the speaker wants to convey.Chapter Five mainly analyzes the conversational implicature in Oliver Twist byviolating the maxim of manner through obscure words, ambiguous or vague sentences,prolix sentences, incomplete sentences and sentences out of order. In Oliver Twist, thecharacters always employ the obscure words, incomplete sentences, prolix sentences toconvey the conversational information. In fact, they violate the manner maxim of theCooperative Principle. Only by using these ways, the conversational implicature thatthey want to show can be conveyed and understood.The last part is the conclusion. It concludes and summarizes what has beendiscussed above. Based on the conversations between the characters in Oliver Twist, itfurther proves that the Cooperative Principle is an influential theory of explainingutterances; otherwise, it has some disadvantages. In order to make up for the defects ofthe Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle perfects the theory of conversationalimplicature and explains that people should not only obey the Cooperative Principle, inspeech communication, but also deliberately violate the Cooperative Principle. That isto say, the best effect of analyzing the conversational implicature can not be obtainedjust from the Cooperative Principle. Therefore, the application of Politeness Principle ishelpful to understand the conversational implicature. The thesis analyzes theconversational implicature from the perspective of the Cooperative Principle so as toreveal the profound problem of social reality, which thus helps understand Oliver Twistfrom a new angle. |
