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Hemingway Hills Like White Elephants Summary

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Ice Burg Beneath the Sea A Conversational Analysis of Hemingway’s Hills like White Elephants in the View of the Theory of Conversational Implicature Zhang Yuqing The application of pragmatics in literature dates back to the 1970s. Before that previous researchers like Morris (1938) had already proposed the connection between pragmatics and rhetoric. But it was not until 1971 that Ohmann first touched the field by defining literature as a type of discourse, and then in 1976 Van Dijk originated the name “Literary Pragmatics”. In his work Toward a Speech Acts Theory of Literary Discourse, Pratt (1977) said language in literary works is also analyzable in terms of linguistics, just like other forms of language, and this theory was later developed by Levinson (1983) into that pragmatics can be applied in all fields including …show more content…

But the man reacts negatively by talking about the temperature and avoiding direct conversation, which implicates that he is fretting and does not want to talk to her. It is possible that they already have arguments before they come to the station. In the subsequent part, the tension between them is ever more obvious. By saying the hills look like white elephants, the girl tries to draw out the topic of the baby. The man is aware of her intention and irritated by that. He violates the Maxim of Quality when he says things contradictory to each other: The man’s brutal tone forces the girl to change the topic, but she does not give up the hope to persuade the man to accept the baby. Before the third part of the conversation they talked about a kind of Spanish alcohol. The girl does not know Spanish, so it can be speculated that the girl relies on the man on this trip. In the third part, the girl attempts the second time, implicating the baby by licorice, but only makes the man’s irritation reaches the highest

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