Realizations of Conversational Implicatures in The Great Gatsby-A Psycholinguistic Perspective

Abstract

The studies of conversational implicature mainly focus on discourse analysis, but relatively few studies are from psychological perspective. This paper aims to investigate how specific words and silence of the masterpiece The Great Gatsby manifest conversational implicatures related to psychological states. The paper is based on the corpus of chapter seven from The Great Gatsby, with high frequency words (i.e. ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘well’, ‘heat’) selected quantitatively in statistics using corpus linguistics methods such as segmentation, clustering, and frequency. The analysis of examples extracted from the novel could manifest that specific words as well as silence are psychologically adequate for conversational implicatures. The psychological accounts of conversational implicature are convincing in the novel, not only rendering it a masterpiece but also leading us to the inquiry of psychologically-based implicatures.