A Study Of The Tragic Relationships In Desire Under The Elms Based On Conversational Implicature Analysis

The drama writing of Eugene O’Neill, the most important American dramatist,marks the maturity of America drama, and makes it a significant part of America literature. Desire under the Elms was one of the most important works of Eugene O’Neil in his second phase of drama writing. As a realistic play, it involves family conflicts, sexual desire tragedy and family dislocation resulted from material desires for land and gold. It narrates the estrangement and conflicts between family members,describes the deconstruction to the family and the poisoning to members under the influence of the strong possessiveness and irresistible desire, displays inextricable destiny tragedies of ordinary people under the control of the insane desire and manifests the deep concern of O’Neill about human beings in the modern society. The language of it is concise and incisive with rich connotations, which makes characters vividly presented and a good play for text analysis.So far Desire under the Elms has been analyzed from the angle of cognitive linguistics and dramatic language, but has not been interpreted under the conversational implicature. This thesis analyzes the dialogues of Desire under the Elms by studying the conversational implicature under the guidance of the cooperative principle, politeness principle and conversational relevance, to reveal personal relationships, character conflicts and communicative intention, representing character conflicts under the cover of material desires and sexual passion desire and discover character tragedies and family tragedies. It helps readers better appreciate the play and have a deep understanding of the author’s composing thought.To ensure that the dialogue go on smoothly, participants are expected to provide clear and sufficient information relevant to the conversational topic. However, in real life, due to various reasons, the utterance of a dialogue is usually obscure, brief, tumid and irrelevant, which generates conversational implicature by violating communicative discipline and are interrelated with the conversational context, socialenvironment and mental state of characters. The cooperative principle and its maxims,indirect politeness strategy and conversational relevance enrich conversational implicature from different angles. This paper selects representative dialogues from Desire under the Elms, which are classified and analyzed according to the relationships between the characters to interpret personal relationships for better displaying the tragic theme of it.With the textual analysis on the play, it can be seen that the greed for land and wealth leads to the profit tendency of characters, the indifference and estrangement between family members and consistent conflicts for farm ownership; the sexual desire on the basis of material desires makes the child become a synonym of materials and eventually a victim under the irreconcilable contradiction between the material desire and lust, thus deepening and extending the tragic theme. This thesis aims to provide a new insight into the analysis on other works of O’Neil in this way.