摘要

在语言交际活动中为了达到特定的目标，说话人和听话人之间存在着一种默契，双方遵守一定的原则，Grice称这种原则为会话的合作原则。伟大的英国文艺复兴时期戏剧作家、诗人威廉•莎士比亚以戏剧著称，《奥赛罗》是其四大悲剧的代表之一。在文学高度发展的今天，他的作品仍然吸引着国内外学者从各种角度对其解读。本文以Grice的合作原则为理论基础，通过《奥赛罗》中的人物对话了解奥赛罗为人光明磊落同时又有嫉妒、猜疑的性格特征。本文从语用学的角度来解读奥赛罗的人物性格特点，希望为文学解读提供一个新的视角。

关键词：合作原则;人物对话;《奥赛罗》
 
Abstract

This thesis is a pragmatic analysis of the conversations in Othello. According to Grice, the conversation can successfully go on, one important premise is that both the addresser and the addressee should have the willingness to carry the conversation on, that is to say, the cooperative attitude of them in the conversation is a necessity. Being aware of that, Grice developed an approach to discourse analysis what he termed Cooperative Principle.
Great English playwright and poet William Shakespeare is famous for his plays. Othello is one of his four tragedies. Today，when literature is highly developed，Shakespeare’s works still attract scholars demotic and abroad study them from different perspectives. This paper adopts Grice Cooperative Principle as the theoretical basis to analyze the play Othello. Othello’s frank and upright, but jealous and suspicious nature is discussed from the perspective of pragmatics. This paper intends to provide a new approach to literary interpretation.

Key words: Cooperative Principle; dialogues of characters; Othello

1. Introduction
According to speech act theory, what a speaker says usually carries illocutionary meaning. So understanding the utterance of the addresser is not simply a matter of knowing the literal meaning. It also involves drawing the indirect meaning on the basis of non-linguistic information. In the process of understanding, both the addresser and the addressee in the talk should have the willingness to carry the conversation on. For that reason, Grice developed an approach to discourse analysis what he termed Cooperative Principle. There were many famous people had discussed Grice’s cooperative principle. Like Kent Bach had said “we need first to get clear on the character of Grice’s maxims. They are not sociological generalizations about speech, nor are they moral prescriptions or proscriptions on what to say or communicate. Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit.” (Bach 2005). The Grice's cooperative principle is used to explain the day-to-day conversation. Using this theory can provide a new perspective for readers to analyze dialogues, and an objective basis for text analysis. Then readers can have a more in-depth understanding of the characters in "Othello", and have a further appreciation for the complicated Shakespeare' language style. In the analysis of conversation, Grice’s cooperative principle will be inevitably mentioned.
Based on the Grice’s Cooperative Principle, this paper intends to interpret the characteristics of Othello by analyzing the conversations in the drama.