Hani, Khalid Jabir (2026) A Pragmastylistic Study of Charles Dickens's Short Story ‘Our School’. Central Asian Journal of Literature, Philosophy and Culture, 7 (4). ISSN 2660-6828

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Abstract

In this paper, the pragma-stylistic features of Charles Dickens's short story Our School (1851) are analyzed from the perspective of Elizabeth Black's (2006) pragma-stylistic framework. This responds to the fact that little systematic work has yet been conducted on the application of an integrated pragma-stylistic perspective to Our School, particularly as linguistic choices entail a meaning that bypasses their literal sense. The study employs a qualitative descriptive research design in analysing chosen extracts from the narrative, relying on five pragmatic tools, namely Speech Act Theory, Grice's Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature, Deixis, Presupposition, and Politeness Theory. This study revolves around the functioning of these realist tools in the negotiation between narrator, character, and implied reader, especially as it concerns contextualization, indirectness, irony, and reader inference. The paper illustrates that Dickens's linguistic decisions fulfil significant pragmatic functions beyond any purely stylistic effect. They see speech acts as serving to evaluate or characterise, and conversational implicatures allowing the narrator to indirectly voice his criticisms. The Diary Frequency also uses deictic expressions, creating a retrospective narrative vision here, especially the collective pronoun "we," which emphasizes aspects of memory and nostalgia within its themes. Dickens assumes the knowledge we have because they are shared, so it can be a kind of tacit information about school life; politeness and impoliteness lay bare our relationships with one another and how these play out in the power dynamics between students, teachers, and vice versa. The sets of pragmatic instruments identified are shown to work not in isolation but together, producing humour and irony while more broadly performing Dickens's critique of Victorian educational practices through an indirect rather than explicitly accusatory manner. In conclusion, this paper finds in Black (2006) a pragma-stylistic framework which is capable of interpreting Our School as an integrated explanation of how linguistic form and contextual meaning interact with communicative intention to result in the full use the reader makes by inference–one lexical choice can lead to all these routes toward meaning. The study also adds to the broader field of Dickens studies by highlighting the value of pragmastylistics as an approach to analysing Victorian literary prose.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Pragmastylistics, speech act theory, cooperative principle and conversational implicature, presupposition, politeness theory
Subjects:	H Social Sciences
Depositing User:	admin eprints
Date Deposited:	10 Oct 2026 05:09
Last Modified:	10 Oct 2026 05:09
URI:	http://eprints.umsida.ac.id/id/eprint/17177

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