Discourse Analysis of Oliver Twist from the Perspective of Pragmatics

Min Lian
2017 Theory and Practice in Language Studies  
As a great representative of the British realism literature in the 19th century, Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist is set in foggy city London, but reflects the complex social reality in that time. Many domestic scholars studied and analyzed this novel from different perspectives, while most of them paid much attention to the literature translation and analysis of the characters' image, few studied it from the perspective of pragmatic theories. In view of it, this paper selects plenty of dialogues
more » ... rom the novel and they are classified and analyzed on the basis of Grice's Cooperative Principle and Leech's Politeness Principle. After analyzing the characters' conversational implicature, this paper aims to provide a linguistic reference for the appreciation of characters' image and social significance of the novel. The paper consists of introduction, main body and conclusion three parts. Introduction part gives a simple introduction of the author Charles Dickens and the novel, then states the previous researches on the subject as well as the research angle, goal and method. The body (consists of two chapters) firstly gives a detailed introduction of the theoretical framework, then analyzes the selected dialogues on the basis of Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle respectively. Conclusion part puts forward that people always express their ideas indirectly and implicitly in their speech communication to violate the Cooperative Principle, that is out of consideration of politeness to others, namely observing Politeness Principle.
doi:10.17507/tpls.0708.04 fatcat:bgkr4sqsznd2bfylbmv2nrbyru