摘 要

《无人生还》是阿加莎•克里斯蒂的著名侦探小说。小说讲述了看似毫无关系的十人，却都由于各种原因直接或间接导致了他人的死亡，但是却没有得到法律的惩罚，他们被法官骗到荒芜人烟的小岛上，然后一个接一个被杀害的故事。而最初由美国哲学家格莱斯提出的会话含义理论，除了其在语用学中的关键作用外，它在交流中也具有重要意义。本文从语言行为和会话含义的语用角度揭示了在这个邪恶世界中人性的黑暗面。从话语文体学角度系统地详细地分析侦探小说中的对话，不仅可以展现侦探小说中对话的功能，还可以展现对话及语言独特的艺术魅力。

关键词：会话含义；人性；邪恶

Abstract

And Then There Were None, a detective fiction by Agatha Christie depicts that ten people, who have previously been complicit in the deaths of others but have escaped notice or punishment, are tricked into coming onto an island and are all mysteriously murdered one by one. The theory of conversational implicature was originally proposed by the American philosopher Grice. In addition to its key role in pragmatics, it also has important implications in communication. This paper reveals the dark side of human nature in this ten evil world from pragmatics perspective of speech act and conversational implicature. In detail, it systematically analyzes the dialogues in detective stories from the perspective of discourse stylistics; so not only the function of their dialogues but also their unique artistic charm can be revealed.

Key Words: conversational implicature; human nature; evil

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Literature Review 3

2.1 History of crime fiction 3

2.2 Previous studies on Agatha Christie and her works 3

3 Theoretical Backgrounds 6

3.1 Definition of conversational implicature 6

3.2 Characteristics of conversational implicature 7

4 Functions of dialogues in And Then There Were None 8

4.1 Using dialogues to reflect distrust 8

4.2 Using dialogues to reflect destruction of tradition 10

4.3 Ten people and “ten evil” 12

5 Conclusion 16

References 17

Acknowledgements 18

Ten Evil World And Then There Were None

1 Introduction

Agatha Christie, one of Britain’s leading female detective novelists, playwrights, and one of the three major reasoning literature masters, was called Queen of Detective Novels. Agatha Christie pioneered the “village villa” school of detective fiction—the homicide occurred in a specifically closed environment and the murderer was someone who has a specific relationship with the victim. She has always motivated and analyzed human nature to present readers with a unique and bizarre, rich psychological world, thereby exposing the richness of people's minds, displaying varied characters, and deeply revealing the complexity of human nature.

In Western critics, research and evaluation of detective stories is in the process of deepening. After 1995, there is an average of 1000 monographs or academic papers on the all-round research of detective stories. (黄薇，2011)However, in China, although the translation of Agatha’s works began earlier, the attention of the academic community to this literary form is rather monotonous. Most of them study the theme significance from the macroscopic level; analyze the methods of narrative and the view about adaptation of the film and television of her work.

Dialogues are an essential part of Agatha’s detective novels. Therefore, this paper analyzes Agatha’s linguistic features from the conversational implicature theory, and presents clever plot concepts and unique narrative techniques to give readers a deeper understanding of Agatha’s language charm; at the same time, it can be seen that in the dialogues of the characters, the author uses the pragmatic strategies of deliberately violating the principles of cooperation, quantity, quality, relations and manner to deepen the subjects of the novel, to shape the characters’ image, and to promote the development of the plot.

The theory of conversational implicature was put forward in 1975 by famous American philosopher Grice. As phrased by Grice, “Make your conversational contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.”(Grice, 1975)In some special cases, people may deliberately ignore these guidelines and thus express different meanings from literal meanings, and speakers hope that their audience can grasp their basic meanings. And this paper mainly uses conversational meaning theory to analyze these special circumstances, seizes the true thoughts of the character’s heart, and portrays humanity.

2 Literature Review

This chapter is intended to introduce the development of crime fiction and the some basic information of Agatha's novels. The first part of this chapter is mainly about the detective fiction from the very beginning, including the first detective novel and the first detective novel writer and so on. The second part is the pervious researches of And Then There Were None and this novel’s content introduction. From this chapter, we can understand the meaning of this paper.

2.1 History of crime fiction

The development of detective fiction has undergone a long and winding process. The basic elements of detective fiction are crimes, suspense, reasoning, etc.

The earliest novel with the prototype of detective fiction should be the "Two Mother’s Stories" in the Bible because it covers the basic elements of detective fiction. However, the true germ of detective stories dates back to the 18th century. Among them, the French writer Voltaire was hailed as “the great-grandfather of detective stories” because his works Zadig had a great influence on the later detective novelists Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle has had an important influence.