The Pragmatics of Aggravation in Coetzee’s Disgrace Novel

Abstract

Aggravation is as an act of sequences that strengthen the universal illocutionary force; therefore, the speaker assaults the self-image of the target, and supporting conflict or struggle. Aggravation has been little attention from a pragmatic perspective; therefore, this paper attempts to identify the pragmatic aspects of aggravation in Coetzee’s Disgrace novel. Specifically, this work sets itself the task of answering the following questions: (1) What are the most predominant speech acts  used in the novel Disgrace (2) What are the most frequently strategies of  aggravation utilized in the chosen novel? And which is the most common non-observed Grice’s maxim in this novel? Consequently, the study aims at identifying the most common speech acts employed in using  aggravation, showing the most frequent  strategies of aggravation utilized in such novel and identifying the most frequently non-observance maxim. It is hypothesized that: Representative and expressive speech acts are more frequently used in the chosen novel. Positive aggravation is the most frequently strategy employed, and quantity maxim is the most frequently non-observance maxim. This study is limited to analyze five texts from ''Disgrace'' novel which written in 1999  by Coetzee . The study ends up with a variety of conclusions, the most central of which is that speech acts of representative, declarative, and expressive are used in Disgrace novel and the use of conversational maxims are to make the communication effective.