A Pragmatic Study of Exaggeration in British and American Novels

Abstract

The main concern of this study is to tackle exaggeration in British and American situations taken from Mrs. Dalloway and The Great Gatsby novels. From a pragmatic point of view, exaggeration in the field of literature has not been given enough attention. Accordingly, this study is an attempt to develop a model for the analysis of exaggeration pragmatically. Thus, it concerns itself with achieving the following aims:(1)investigating the kinds of speech acts through which the exaggeration language occurs in Mrs. Dalloway and The Great Gatsby novels.(2)identifying  the devices of exaggeration used in Mrs. Dalloway and The Great Gatsby novels.(3)showing how exaggerators pragmatically proceed the Politeness Principle and the Cooperative Principle in these two novels.(4)figuring out the pragmatic functions of exaggeration used in these two novels.

In relation to the abovementioned aims, the following hypotheses are tested:(1) various kinds of speech acts through which the exaggeration language occurs can be used in Mrs. Dalloway and The Great Gatsby novels.(2)a variety of devices of exaggeration are used in these two novels.(3)the Politeness Principle and the Cooperative Principle are violated in The Great Gatsby more than in Mrs. Dalloway.(4)there are different pragmatic functions for exaggeration in these novels.To achieve the aforementioned aims, the following procedures are followed:(1)surveying the relevant literature on exaggeration in general and its pragmatic perspective in particular.(2)analyzing the exaggeration language pragmatically in Mrs. Dalloway and The Great Gatsby according to a model developed by this study.The results of the analysis prove the first, second, and fourth hypotheses, whereas they partially reject the third hypothesis and partially verify it.

Keywords: Exaggeration, Pragmatics, Speech acts.