Studying Characters Through Conversation: Application of Co-operative and Politeness Principles to Two Amharic Plays

Short Title: Studying Characters Through Conversation examines how conversational frameworks from pragmatics can be used to study characters in a play through their conversational behavior. It starts with a general objective of demonstrating how co-operative and politeness principles operate in a context other than English i.e. Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia. It then moves on to discussing how the characters' conversational behavior in general and their exploitation of the conversational maxims in particular, can give insights which can be useful means of studying dramatic characters. Carefully selected conversational extracts taken from the play scripts are subjected to a pragmatic analysis to show the workings of the co-operative and politeness principles. This is followed by the making of inferences about the characters, particularly about their personality traits, relationship with each other and their change and development in the progress of the plays.