A Study Of The Conversational Implicature Of The Heroine’s Utterances In An American Daughter

An American Daughter is Wendy Wasserstein’s last feminist play in 20 th century,which reveals how the heroine breaks through all kinds of obstacles to gain political power and rebuild self-identity.Since its language is trenchant,vivid,humorous,and full of rich meaning,it becomes a good subject for linguistic study.This thesis applies CI Theory to study the heroine’s pragmatic strategies.It combines qualitative and quantitative research methods to analyze the dialogues between the heroine Lyssa and other characters in the play and the statistics of Lyssa’s use of off-record strategies are presented and analyzed.The research questions of this thesis are as follows: Firstly,how does Lyssa deliver her conversational implicature through the violation of CP? Secondly,What kind of relationship between Lyssa and other characters can be revealed? Thirdly,what functions do Lyssa’s pragmatic strategies generate?The research results demonstrate that:1).In general,Lyssa inclines to violate the Relevance Maxim and Quality Maxim to purposely generate CI,but violate the Manner Maxim when she has conversations with Timber.Under the circumstance of violating CP,the most frequent off-record politeness strategy Lyssa employs is “Giving hints”.And the number of her utterances to Walter is maximum so the strategies she employs to Walter are the most abundant.Moreover,Lyssa inclines to employ the strategy of “ellipsis” to Walter,the “Irony”strategy to Quincy,the “Over-generalization” strategy to Judith,the “Being vague”strategy to Timber,and the use of other strategies has no particular distinguishing features.2).Lyssa’s variable choices of pragmatic strategies to different characters reflect all kinds of relationship between her and other characters(Walter,Quincy,Alan,Judith and Timber).Her relationship with Walter is the most intimate and the most intricate,with Quincy is adversarial,with Judith supporting and caring,with Alan reliant,and her relationship with Timber is very special(interviewee and interviewer)because Lyssa needs to maintain Timber’s face and to protect her own face at thesame time.3).The use of these pragmatic strategies reflect Lyssa’s different appeals in the plight,which sublimates the theme of the play.Moreover,some pragmatic strategies especially the strategy of “Irony” creates some humorous effect.