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Wei Lijuan(2008), by analyzing the original English lines, believes that it is of great significance that language plays a role in portraying Gump’s loyalty, friendships, optimism and persistence which are good and noble human qualities as well as displaying the philosophies of life.
From a rhetorical aspect, Duan Ruijun and Xun Jin (2008) make an analysis on the lines in Forrest Gump.
The adoption of these new approaches has enriched and advanced the study of Forrest Gump. However, in the studies mentioned above, the exploration of the conversational implicatures of the dialogues in Forrest Gump are left untouched or lack systematic analysis. To fill up the gap, this study tries to explore this area from the aspect of pragmatics and expects to make some possible contributions.
3. Theoretical Framework
Grice’s Theory of Conversational Implicature can offer an explanatory theory for the study of human speech communication. Levinson (1983) states, it offers some clear account of how it is possible to mean more than what is actually said. Therefore, Grice’s Theory of Conversational Implicature is adopted as the guiding theory of the study, with Grice’s Cooperative Principle constituting the theoretical basis for the analysis. This chapter is committed to the introduction of the theoretical framework of the study, namely, Grice’s Theory of Conversational Implicature and Cooperative Principle.
3.1 Definition of Conversational Implicature
From Grice’s (1975) point of view, conventional implicature refers to a meaning that depends upon special words such as “therefore”, etc. Conversational implicature refers to a meaning or message which is implicated in a conversation which involves context. In real communication, when people oversay or undersay something, they bring some extra meaning or meanings that are beyond the literal meanings of words and sentences. This extra meaning or implied meaning left in actual language use is conversationally dependent, hence conversational implicature. And conversational implicature invites the listener to manage to work out the complete message when the speaker means more than what they say.
From the distinctions between conversational implicature and implicature, it can be known that conversational implicature must have some restrictive conditions. On the one hand, the speaker gives extra meaning to his words to express his unspoken intention according to different contexts; on the other hand, the listener is expected to distinguish correctly the conversational implicature by related inference. During the process of inference, context is the key factor that can affect conversational implicature. The same sentence “it’s hot” may imply that the hearer should either turn on the air conditioner or turn off or something else. Therefore, when the hearer makes sure the conversational implicature, it is crucial for him to consider the context.