An Adaptive Analysis Of Character Utterances In Great Expectations

Novel dialogue is usually regarded as the soul of a novel.It plays a vital role in the creation of art images,the plot development,the construction of the themes and so on.Great Expectations is one of the masterpieces written by Charles Dickens,a great English realistic novelist of the nineteenth century.It is recognized by critics as one of Dickens' s best works,which embodies Dickens' s mature writing style.The superb language skill,complex characters,suspenseful plots and the social theme give this novel great artistic charm and social value.The dialogues in Great Expectations,small in number but valuable in quality,make the novel more readable.Character utterances,as the words reveal,are produced by characters in the fictional world.They occur in specific situations and form novel dialogue.They have high degree of similarity with natural language because they highly rely on the communicative context and observe pragmatic rules.Therefore,character utterances provide vivid data for pragmatic study of novel dialogue.Based on Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory,the present study attempts to make a qualitative analysis of character utterances in Great Expectations at two levels: novel characters and the novel author.The first level is to explore dialogues from the aspect of characters,the study reveals that language choice made by characters is a process of dynamic adaption to the contextual correlates,namely,the mental world,the social world and the physical world.The second level is to explore the novel author's purpose of adaptation.The utterances of characters in the novel represent the novel author's adaptive purpose.The dialogues in Great Expectations,are the results of the author's careful design rather than the random arrangement.These adaptive utterances of characters have deep meanings.By choosing language for characters,the novel author realizes his writing purpose for character portraying,the construction of the multiple themes and the plot development so as to realize the interaction with readers.This study is a new attempt to apply Adaptation Theory to literary analysis.It provides a completely new research perspective for understanding and appreciation of literary works,and may help readers better understand language art of literature,so as to better appreciate the literary works.