Abstract—This study investigates the particularized conversational implicatures (PCIs) invited by Clementianna, an antagonist in a 2012 American comedy fantasy film based on the fairy tale Snow White. Brown and Levinson’s off-record politeness strategy was adopted to analyze the queen’s utterances that contained PCIs. The purpose of the study was twofold: to find the character’s reason behind inviting each PCI and to examine whether social distance has an effect on the use of PCIs. Eleven PCIs which served various purposes were found in the queen’s utterances. The most frequently used off-record strategy was to “give hints”, which occurred seven times, whereas “overgeneralize”, “use rhetorical questions”, “overstate”, and “be ambiguous” strategies were violated only once each. Social distance also seemed to play a prominent role; that is, the queen invited much more PCIs with “intimates” than with “friends” or “strangers”, suggesting that indirect utterances corresponded to the social distance between the speaker and the interlocutor.
Index Terms—Mirror mirror, particularized conversational implicature, off-record politeness strategy, social distance.
Itsara Namtapi is with the Language Center, Valaya Rajabhat University under the Royal Patronage, Moo 20 Phahonyothin Road, Klong-Nueng, Klongluang, Pathumthani, 13180, Thailand (e-mail: itsaranamtapi178@gmail.com).
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Cite:Itsara Namtapi, "A Study of Clementianna’s Particularized Conversational Implicatures in Mirror Mirror," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 203-207, 2018.