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A Pragmatic Analysis of Gone with the Wind

Author: XuYanZhe
Tutor: GaoZhiHuai
School: Hebei Normal
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: pragmatic analysis cooperative principle Gone With the Wind Off-record politeness strategy
CLC: H313
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 147
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Abstract


This thesis attempts to analyze the conversations selected from the famous novel Gone With the Wind by applying the Cooperative Principle (CP), the Politeness Principle (PP) and the Face Work Theory, so as to smooth the way of studying the pragmatic theories by means of taking the case of literary works.Gone With the Wind is a famous and everlasting novel. Numerous criticisms and reviews have been made on this novel from the literary perspective. But there is not so much analysis of its conversations from the pragmatic point of view until recent years. In the theoretical foundation, the author introduces Grice’s cooperative principle and the violations of its four maxims, Leech’s politeness principle and Brown and Levinson’s face work theory in details. The CP points out that if the speaker wants to continue a conversation, s/he should be cooperative and comply with the four maxims. When the speaker deliberately violates certain maxims and s/he tries to let the hearer realize that, then Conversational Implicature (CI) is generated. The PP gives reasons why the speaker prefers to violate certain CP maxims and employ indirect conversations. Brown and Levinson’s face theory explains that almost every act involves face threat to the hearer, but the speaker tries to save the hearer’s face by performing different face threatening acts.The primary part of this thesis is analyzing selected conversations by the above pragmatic theories. The conversations are classified into three main categories according to the five superstrategies distinguished by Brown and Levinson. They are: Do the face threatening acts (FTA) bald On-record; Do the FTA On-record with redressive action (this one includes the positive politeness and the negative politeness) and Do the FTA off-record. For the last strategy“Do not do the FTA”does not say anything, so the author does not discuss it quite much. As the Off-record strategy does not clearly mention the act whose content is conveyed by violating the Gricean maxims and then conversational implicature is generated, the author pays more attention to this strategy. By analyzing the novel, the author finds that the characters of Gone With the Wind do not care about the hearer’s face when it is in the benefit of the hearer or the face threatening is on the secondary importance. They try to save the hearer’s positive or negative face in ordinary conversations, flout certain maxims for the purpose of being politeness and produce CI and reach their conversational goals.This thesis has theoretical and practical significance, it could help to analyze the masterpiece from a brand new perspective and smooth the way of using the literary works to prove and develop the pragmatic theories. It can also help improve the communicative effect reach the speaker’s conversational goals.

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