A Study Of Conversational Implicature Of The Dialogues In House Of Cards From The Perspective Of The Cooperative Principle

House of Cards is very popular on the Internet. Based on the background of everyday life in contemporary American political field. House of Cards tells the story that how a wily congressman and his ambitious wife try to realize their desire for the supreme power in American politics step by step. It has won high audience rating when released to the public. Recently, this hot TV play is also becoming popular in China. Two important reasons why House of Cards became very popular as soon as it was released on the screen are its successfully designed dialogues and various language tactics used by the characters in this TV play.House of Cards has been studied by some scholars from various perspectives since it was released on the screen in 2013, such as political perspective, cultural perspective, media perspective, literary perspective and subtitle translation. However, after reading a lot of literature, I find few scholars study this hot TV play from the perspective of linguistics. In House of Cards, a common dialogue phenomenon is that the characters often do not speak their purposes directly or explicitly, but tend to imply them. Therefore, this thesis would like to study these dialogues of characters and interpret this TV play from the perspective of pragmatics.Under the guidance of Grice"s Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature Theory, dialogues violating CP maxims and sub-maxims in House of Cards are selected and classified into different groups according to Grice’s CP. Conversational implicature of those dialogues in the given situation of contexts is analyzed in detail. The thesis digs out those dialogues" implied meaning from their superficial literal meaning to make a deep interpretation of House of Cards, tries to find out the functions of conversational implicature of these dialogues violating CP maxims in the whole story, and also helps to give readers a thorough understanding and appreciation of dialogues in this popular contemporary American political TV thriller.This thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction of the thesis. This chapter contains four parts introducing the research background, research purpose and significance, research methodology and structure of the thesis respectively.The second chapter is literature review. This chapter mainly reviews both foreign and domestic research status and the application fields of CP and Conversational Imlicature Theory, and then the previous studies on House of Cards. On the basis of the research status, in the end, this chapter points out the research feasibility and necessity of analyzing conversational implicature of dialogues in House of Cards from the perspective of the Cooperative Principle.The third chapter is the theoretical framework of this thesis. Firstly, it systematically introduces Grice’s Cooperative Principle including the definition of CP, four Maxims of CP and violation of these Maxims. Secondly, it introduces the Theory of Conversational Implicature, including the definition and characteristics of Conversational Implicature.The fourth chapter is the main body of the thesis. It mainly analyzes the conversational implicature of dialogues violating CP Maxims in House of Cards. A lot of relevant examples violating CP in this TV play are selected and analyzed in detail. This chapter includes six parts. Part one tells the plot, main characters and character relationships in House of Cards. Part two selects dialogues violating Quantity Maxim in House of Cards to analyze their conversational implicature in two cases:the speaker provides more information and the speaker provides less information. Part three selects dialogues violating Quality Maxim in this TV play to analyze their conversational implicature in three cases:false information, unreliable information and figures of speech. Part four selects dialogues violating Relation Maxim in House of Cards and analyzes their conversational implicature in two cases:partial irrelevant information and complete irrelevant information. Part five selects dialogues violating Manner Maxim in this TV play to analyze their conversational implicature in four cases:obscurity, ambiguity, prolixity and disorder. Part six is the summary of this chapter.The fifth chapter is the conclusion of the whole thesis. In this chapter, findings and limitations of this thesis are listed, and some suggestions for future research on House of Cards are put forward.On the basis of studies mentioned above, this thesis draws the following conclusions. On the one hand, conversational implicature of dialogues violating CP in this political thriller is essential and meaningful. Dialogues violating CP in House of Cards have decisive functions of portraying personal characteristics, digging out character conflicts, promoting plot development and presenting story themes from beginning to end. On the other hand, analyzing dialogues violating CP in TV plays or films can be a useful way for researchers who study languages in American TV plays or films to interpret those works thoroughly, which can also indirectly help audiences to have a deeper understanding of them. In addition, by using CP and Conversational Implicature Theory to the analysis of character dialogues in House of Cards, this thesis helps to verify that combining pragmatics with film-video appreciation is feasible and effective, which may broaden the range of traditional video appreciation approaches. It is expected that the Cooperative Principle, Conversational Implicature Theory and other pragmatic theories can be more and more widely used in the field of film-video appreciation in the future.