Abstract: Criticisms and reviews on Persuasion, the world classic written by the famous British woman writer Jane Austen, have been too numerous to mention individually. Most of  the comments were from the literary perspective. The pragmatics in linguistics provides language studies with not only a brand-new theoretical perspective but also feasible practical techniques. This paper, as a qualitative case study, attempts to analyze the conversational implicature of dialogues in Persuasion by employing Cooperative Principle, in order to explore the way of analyzing literary works from perspective of pragmatics. The illustrations are classified into different categories in accordance with its violation of the maxim of Cooperative Principle. By exploring the conversational implicature from the approach of pragmatics in Persuasion, this paper hopes to contribute to the understanding this world classic, and help shed some light on the usefulness of the pragmatic approach to the interpretation of fictions, and enrich the conventional criticism on Jane Austen.

Key words: conversational implicature; Cooperative Principle; Persuasion

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

1. Introduction-1

2. Theoretical Basis: Cooperative Principle (CP)-4

2.1 Definitions-4

2.1.1 Definition of CP-4

2.1.2 Definition of Conversational Implicature-4

2.2 Classification of CP-5

2.2.1 The Four Maxims of CP-6

2.2.2 Violation of the Four Maxims-7

3. Analysis of Conversational Implicature in Persuasion-8

3.1 Violation of the Quality Maxim in Persuasion-9

3.2 Violation of the Quantity Maxim in Persuasion-11

3.3 Violation of the Relation Maxim in Persuasion-15

3.4 Violation of the Manner Maxim in Persuasion-17

4. Conclusion-18