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Secondly, the analysis of CI by presenting a great number of examples in the plot enables English learners to get a better understanding of the conversation from a pragmatic perspective, and improves their pragmatic competence at the same time.
Thirdly, it indicates that the application of CI in some certain contexts may help relief the tension in a conversation and avoid conflicts between people, which can be regarded as a kind of communication skill for language leaners to employ.
1.3 Research Questions
This research is done mainly based on the detailed analysis on the conversations taken from the British TV program Downtown Abbey. There are three research questions prepared for such a pragmatic research. They are:
1. What are the Inferences of CI in Dialogues?
2. What are the common strategies to generate Conversational Implicatures?
3. What are the causes for violating maxims of Cooperative Principle?
1.4 Outline of the paper
The first chapter gives an introduction of the paper. The second chapter presents the theories adopted in the research. The third chapter carries out a discussion on the inference of Conversational Implicature of Dialogues. The fourth chapter mainly focuses on the analysis of the materials taken from the drama. The last chapter draws a conclusion to the present research.
2. Literature Review
2.1 Pragmatics & Implicature
The concept Pragmatics was first introduced by Charles W. Morris in his Foundation of the Theory of Signs in 1938 for philosophical purpose. Then in the 1950s and 1960s, this concept started to be regarded as a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. In 1962, Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin in his How to Do Things with Words introduces Speech Act Theory to Pragmatics to solve the question that how people make use of conversation to achieve their goals and what makes it possible. His theory is the beginning of modern Pragmatics and is then further developed by J.R. Searle. In 1967, H.P. Grice in his groundbreaking Logic and Conversation (a speech in Harvard University, 1967) pides words into two parts, what is said and what is implicated, or in other words, implicature, which is the most frequently used term in Pragmatics. Implicature refers to something that is suggested in an utterance, neither explicitly expressed nor strictly implied by the utterance. The theory of implicature is meant to explain how a listener gets from something said to something meant, from the level of explicit meaning to the implicated meaning. By applying his theory to analysis on rhetoric, Grice points out that the actual meaning of metaphor equals to implicature. He believes that to understand what a metaphor means, audience has to interpret the words literally first, then realize that it is not accurate and at last try to understand implications. However, until now researchers have determined that implicature has more properties than Grice believes to distinguish itself from any rhetoric.
2.2 Implicature categorization,源^自(优尔:文,论)文]网[www.youerw.com
According to Logic and Conversation (another speech in Harvard University sharing the name of the 1967 version, 1975) and Studies in the Way of Words (Grice, 1991), implicature can be categorized into two parts: conventional implicature and conversational implicature. Conventional implicature depends upon the meaning of special words such as “therefore”. In other words, it conveys the same implicature regardless of the interpretation of the contexts. Conversational implicature refers to the implicit meaning in a conversation that involves context. The theory does not research the language from the perspective of grammar or semantic meaning, but lays emphasis on the interpretation of the implied meaning beyond its literal meaning through analyzing certain contexts in essence.
Different from the notion of implicature, conversational implicature is attached to several restrictive conditions. In a conversation involved with conversation implicature, the speaker conveys extra meaning to his utterances according to different contexts, and the hearer is expected to interpret the conversation implicature according to the related inference. According to Leech (1983), he believes that Grice’s Conversational Implicature enables literal meaning to convert into implicature, offering a vital predictive model for the study of speech communications. Specifically, according to Grice’s theory, there are at least three core elements included in a conversational implicature, namely the users, context and inference.