An Analysis of the Personalities in Love Is a Fallacy From the Perspective of Cooperative Principle

Pragmatics, closely related to the literature, serves as an effective tool for studying and appreciating literary works. From the perspective of Cooperative Principle, this study analyzes the conversation in Love Is a Fallacy with an aim to help readers to systematically decode the characters’ personalities. The results of the analysis indicate that vivid personalities have been successfully portrayed through characters’ violation of Cooperative Principle, but Polly only violated the maxims of quantity and relation as a result of her simpleness and ignorance, which offers different perspectives in critically interpreting the female images in Shulman’s works.