A Study Of Conversational Implicatures In The Dialogues Of The American Serial Once Upon A Time

Since Paul Grice put forward conversational implicature and cooperative principle in1967, pragmatists have successively proposed distinguished conversational principles, suchas politeness principle, Q-principle, R-principle, I-principle and M-principle, etc. Morerecently, Relevance Theory with a cognitive-pragmatic approach raised by Sperber andWilson has been given great concern. The present research takes American serial as theresearch data because there have been many empirical studies of conversationalimplicature on literary works, but few studies have focused on American serials. Therefore,conversational implicatures in dialogues of American serial is the focus in this research.Conversational implicature is analyzed in the dialogues of American serial OnceUpon a Time in a cognitive-pragmatic way in this study, on the basis of Relevance Theoryand politeness theory. There are two research questions in this empirical study:1) what arethe conversational implicatures found in the data?2) How do the variables, such as socialdistance, power relation and ranking of imposition, influence dialogues and theirimplicatures? This paper answers the above two research questions by transcribing dataand analyzing it. Firstly, data are transcribed based on Deborah Tennan’s transcriptionconventions (1984) and then conversational implicatures are recognized; secondly,conversational implicatures in the dialogues are categorized by three influential variables,and the numbers and the percentage of conversational implicatures are listed. The mainfindings of this research are that1) altogether1219conversational implicatures are foundin the data, including generalized conversational implicatures and particularizedconversational impicatures; in addition, within particularized conversational implicatures,context is a great influential factor, that is, one particularized conversational implicatureconveys various intended meanings in different contexts;2) the analysis of the threevariables suggests that the characters in the serial do have an automatic tendency tomaximize relevance in conversations and every act of ostensive communicationcommunicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance; and from relevance-theoreticalperspective, it is easier to explore the generation and interpretation of conversationalimplicature in the serial.Theoretically, such finding implies that it is feasible to combine Relevance Theorywith politeness theory to interpret conversational implicature. Practically, it inspires and enlightens that transcription and categorization contribute to further study onconversational implicature. However, data collected are relatively small; the approach fordata collection is slightly subjective and other categories are expected to be discovered.