会话原则下的文化因素(3)

2.2 Tommy: Mother! The lorry going by is as big as a mountain!

Mother: Why, dear, I’ve told you over ten thousand times not to exaggerate things so terribly and your bad habit remains unchanged.

It is believed that there is no such a lorry as big as a mountain on earth and it is also believed that the mother could not have told her soon over ten thousand times. Hyperbole, just like irony, metaphor and meiosis are all the results that violate the Quality maxim. Of course, if the mother herself had not exaggerated, the story would not be so funny.

3． Violation of the Relation maxim

3.1 周冲：爸， 我听说矿上对于这次受伤的工人不给一点抚恤金。

周朴园：（头一扬）我认为你这次话说得太多了。（《雷雨》） 

Zhou Puyuan did not provide any information about what Zhou Chong was interested in. On the contrary, he used a performative utterance: To let Zhou Chong shut up. Violation of the Relation maxim, in fact, is used to prevent Zhou Chong talking about matters concerning the accident in the mines and injuries of the workers.

3.2 Another example comes from a true story of the writer. One day she asked one of her students to read the text in class. Owing to lack of concentration, the student misread another text, so the writer said, “你的书是那个版本的?” instead of direct criticizing. All the class had a good laugh, including the boy himself, but everyone understood her intention of irony.

4． Violation of the Manner maxim

4.1 “一个人死了之后，究竟有没有魂灵？”

“也许有罢，我想。”我于是吞吞吐吐地说。

“那么，也就有地狱了？”

“啊！地狱？”我很吃惊，只得支吾着，“地狱？论理，就该也有。然而也未必……谁来管这等事……”(《祝福》)

To violate the manner maxim means that the speaker speaks obscurely and ambiguously instead of speaking briefly and orderly. Lu Xun is a great master of language, so he used mild and indirect words in place of more accurate or direct words in order not to bring mental agony to her. Also, pun, which is “a form of speech play in which a word or phrase unexpectedly and simultaneously combines two unrelated meanings” (Huang, 139), is often used to produce conversational implicature.

4.2 Mrs. Jones: We’re going to be neighbors now. We’ve brought a home next to you, right on the edge of the lake.

Mrs. Brown: So glad! Hope you’ll drop in sometimes.

4.3 I finally figured out how government works. The senate gets the bill from the House, the President gets the bill from the Senate, and we get the bill for everything.

The key word in example 2 is “drop”, which bears the meaning “fall” and leaves space to the readers to imagine if Mrs. Jones fell into the lake. If Mrs. Brown changed the ambiguous “drop” into “visit”, no humor will be produced. In example 3, the first and the second “bill”s refer to the draft of a proposed law, while the third one refers to a written statement of money owned. The author satirically exposes the corruption of the officials, while the common people have to bear the burden.

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