2. Literature Review 2

2.1 Pragmatics & Implicature 2

2.2 Implicature categorization 2

2.3 Four maxims 4

2.4 Grice’s Axiomatization 6

2.5 Difficulties & Other Theories 7

3. Inference of Conversational Implicature of Dialogues 9

3.1 CI Generated by Violating the Quantity Maxim 9

3.2 CI Generated by Violating the Quality Maxim 10

3.3 CI Generated by Violating the Relation Maxim 13

3.4 CI Generated by Violating the Manner Maxim 15

4. Discussion 16

4.1 Under the maxim of Quantity 16

4.1.1 Overstatement 16

4.2.2 Understatement 16

4.2 Under the maxim of Quality 16

4.2.1 Telling Lies 16

4.2.2. Irony 17

4.2.3. Metaphor 17

4.2.4 Hyperbole 17

4.2.5. Paradox 17

4.3 Under the maxim of Relation 17

4.3.1 Topic change 17

4.3.2 Giving hints 17

4.4 Under the maxim of Manner 18

4.4.1 Being Vague 18

5. Conclusion 19

5.1 Analysis of the Inferences of CI in Dialogues 19

5.2 Common Strategies to Generate Conversational Implicatures 19

5.3 Reasons of Violating Maxims of Cooperative Principle 19

5.3.1 Politeness 19

5.3.2 Humor 20

5.3.3 Sarcasm 20

5.3.4 Offering other important information 20

5.4 Summary 20

References 22

1. Introduction

1.1 Research Background

Conversation is an interactive communication between people, which plays an essential role in the socialization. In a conversation, the speaker usually conveys his or her intention by directly uttering it. However, it is not uncommon that people sometimes prefer to convey their intentions in a roundabout way, which gives rise to the conversational implicature. To interpret the additional conveyed meaning from a pragmatic perspective, numerous linguistics and scholars have studied it for many years. Conversational Implicature (CI) was put forward by H. P. Grice in 1967, who also put forth Cooperative Principle (CP) which is one of the fundamental theories in pragmatics. In China, there were many studies on CI and CP, most of which are based on the analysis of the daily dialogue, teaching language, advertising languages, but only a few researched authentic English materials. Therefore, this thesis aims to take the living language from a popular British TV program Downtown Abbey as the corpus for the analysis of CI from the view of CP.

1.2 Research Significance

The significance of this study lies in 3 aspects. 

Firstly, the analysis of the latest language will enrich the resources of research materials on CI.