This research report analyzes a text based on a pragmatic perspective. The text is a transcript extracted from the fantasy adventure film, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It is about four British children, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are endangered by World War Two and they settle down in a country home where a wardrobe leading to the fantasy world of Narnia is found. The text is the transcript of the two scenes, where the children spend their time in the country home and Lucy meets a faun called Tumnus in the world of Narnia. The first part of the report identifies the elements of the context which are relevant to understand the conversation, such as the deixis, the presuppositions and the indirect speech acts. The second part then analyzes the use of the adversative connective "but"as argumentative device in details.
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Elements of the Context.
1. Deixis.
Given that deixis is "the single most obvious way in which the relationship between language and context is reflected" (Levinson, 1983, p. 54), there are many different kinds of deixis identified in the text that encode the features of the context of utterance as follows,.
1.1. Person Deixis.
Person deixis which "concerns the encoding of the role of participants in the speech event in which the utterance in question Is delivered" (Levinson, 1983, p. 62) is the most common type of deixis identified. Person deixis is expressed in terms of pronouns. For first person pronouns, both "we" and "I" are found. In line 2, 7, 13, 14, such as "We can do whatever we want here", we are first person symbolic deixis highlighting the speaker's (Peter) references to himself, the addressee (Lucy) and other participants (Susan and Edmund) who are in the spatial-temporal parameter (the country home) because we here are 'we-inclusive-of-addressee'. The first person deixis "I" and "you" are also found in scene 2.
