A Study of Conversational Implicature in Lady Chatterley’s Lover from the Perspective of Cooperative Principle

Abstract

Lady Chatterley's Lover is Lawrence's last important novel. Lawrence describes the rebellion and pursuit of the heroine Connie in marriage and love.Lawrence was good at using dialogue to describe round characters. The characters in the novel frequently violate some Cooperative Principle maxims, thus producing various conversational implicature which enrich their personalities. This article uses the Cooperative Principle(CP) to analyze the typical dialogue in the novel that violates the CP. And it's hoped that the CP approach to Lady Chatterley's Lover in this article may help readers understand the theme, plot and several main characters' personalities better and also provide some enlightenment for the practicality of the pragmatic approach in the interpretation of prose novels. This article adopts the literature research method, through the related literature review, analyzing the protagonist's implication from the perspective of Cooperative Principle; through the text analysis method, this article carries on the analysis to the protagonist's dialogues which violate the Cooperative Principle, analyzing the implied meanings; also by using the CP and the dialogues to connect the real life, it will help readers to further grasp the protagonist's intention.