PRAGMATICS IN EUGÈNE IONESCO’S THEATER
The use of Grice’s cooperative principles, conversational maxims and implicatures are of great utility in deciphering the semantic meanings of Ionesco's “absurdist” plays. Based on these concepts of pragmatic linguistics, we evaluate the meaning of Ionesco's short plays (The Bald Soprano, The Lesson and The Chairs) in relation to the communicative situation. Pragmatics is the field of linguistics that studies the meaning in conversation, as it is communicated by the speaker/writer and decoded to be understood by the listener/reader. Pragmatics is also the study of contextual meaning and how we communicate more than we say. Absurdist plays are particularly appropriate for such analysis, since reference and inference play an essential role in understanding the situation as well as the meaning of the characters in the tirades they utter on stage.