The Pragmatic Analysis of Wilde’s Comedy: The Importance of Being Ernest

Abstract

This paper attempts to pragmatically analyze the verbal behavior of the protagonists of Oscar Wilde's play 'The importance of being Ernest'. The goal of the research is to investigate the conversations in this literary genre, comedy of manners, from a pragmatic perspective. The analysis covers various pragmatic concepts such as implicature and conversational maxims. The focus of interest is the dyads which create triggers for particular implications in this literary genre. This paper applies Grice's Cooperative Principle to this literary genre to explore which conversational maxims are observed, flouted or violated, and to identify whether the speakers violate the maxims deliberately, unostentatiously or unconsciously. It then illustrates the implicature behind the violated maxim. The results of this study show that in most cases speakers tend to violate the Grice's four maxims of Quality, Manner, Quantity, and Relation respectively, in order to create the intended implicatures.