An Analysis of Conversational Implicature in Persuasion Based on Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle

In the actual communicative language, people sometimes deliberately violate the Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle in order to produce Conversational Implicature for the sake of conversation. Dialogue in literature, as a special conversation, can also be analyzed by pragmatic theory. Persuasion is Jane Austen’s last novel, which tells the story of a young man and woman from different backgrounds who are reunited after a difficult time and finally come to a happy ending. This novel has been studied from different perspectives over the years. In China, some scholars have explored the paradoxes of self-concern and altruism in Persuasion from the perspective of emotional recognition; some scholars have studied the image of the navy in Persuasion; some scholars have focused on the feminism and gender relations embodied in the novel; and some scholars have discussed the marriage model in Persuasion. Foreign scholars have mainly focused on the analysis of the novel’s characters and the study of the romanticism and feminism in the novel. However, few scholars have explored the conversational implicature of the dialogues in Persuasion. Therefore, this paper intends to explore and interpret the conversational implicature of some dialogues in Jane Austen’s Persuasion from the perspective of Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Leach’s Politeness Principle, aiming to reveal the personality of the novel’s main characters, Anne and Winterworth, and other characters, so as to help readers better understand the novel’s theme.