Acknowledgments At the end of my writing I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the following people for their selfless dedication and contribution to my thesis.
Firstly, I want to show my profound gratitude to Associate Prof. Yu Jing, my supervisor, for her constant guidance and encouragement in the process of my writing. Under the considerable and constructive advice, practical and profound suggestions she had offered me, I begin to get a clear fragment of the paper and have successfully accomplished it. Without her support and help, the completion of the present thesis is impossible.42723
Secondly, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the teachers who have ever taught me throughout my college years, especially Cheng Qinghua, my British Literature course teacher. His profound knowledge of western literature cultures led me into the world of culture, and also inspired me to make efforts in English learning. I am also very grateful to all other teachers of the School of Foreign Languages who gave me direct or indirect help during my study in the college.
I am also grateful to my classmates and roommates. They have spared time in helping me solve the problems in the process of writing this paper. They have also given me numbers of encouragement, support, comments and wise advice..
Last, I wish to devote this paper to my parents for their everlasting dedication that they have shown me and the support that advocate me to overcome difficulties in the way to the graduation of the university.
Abstract
Conversation plays an important role not only in our daily life but also in novels. As an art of human beings’ civilization, novels act as a reflection describing the daily life, a sarcasm revealing the social phenomenon and an alarm inspiring human beings’ consciousness. It is common to understand plots and characteristics of figures through analyzing conversations in novels. In the process of literary study, researchers pay more attention to the function of Cooperative Principle and conversational implicatures in novels.
Oxford philosopher Herbert Paul Grice firstly proposed Cooperative Principle, a principle that people follow when they have conversations with others. He noted that in daily conversations people do not usually say things directly but tend to imply them, and he then proposed the theory of conversational implicature for the purpose of analyzing the implied meaning revealed under the conversations.
The paper mainly analyzes the conversational implicatures and embodiment of Cooperative Principle of the conversations in Gone with the Wind, written by American novelist Margaret Mitchell. The paper falls into five parts. The first part serves as an introduction. The second part aims at analyzing the different researches on conversational implicatures and Cooperative Principle among Chinese and Western scholars. The third part introduces the application of the Cooperative Principle and its function on highlighting the theme. The fourth part focuses on the application and function of conversational implicatures and Cooperative Principle on shaping the figures in the novels. The fifth part functions as a conclusion.
Key Words: Gone with the Wind, conversational implicature, Cooperative Principle
摘要对话不仅在我们的日常生活中起着重要的作用,在小说中也有着非常重要的地位。作为人类文明的艺术,小说可以是描绘日常生活的一个缩影,可以是揭露社会现象的一种讽刺,也可以是唤起人类觉醒的警钟。通过小说中的对话来分析故事情节和人物特征是很平常的。在对于小说的研究中,研究者们也越来越重视合作原则与会话含义在小说中的作用。
首次提出合作原则的是牛津大学哲学家赫伯特˙保罗˙格莱斯。合作原则是人们在与他人进行对话时所遵循的原则。他提到,在日常对话中,人们通常不会直接的说出来,而是倾向于暗示别人。接着,为了分析隐藏在对话背后的意思,他又提出了会话含义。