A Critical Pragmatic Approach to Aggression in Moriatry's Big Little Lies

People are supposed to use language harmoniously and compatibly. However, aggression may characterize much of human communication. Aggression has long been recognized as a negative anti-social issue that prevails in most personal interactions. If it abounds in familial communications, it is more dangerous due to its harmful effects on individuals, and consequently on societies. Aggression refers to all the instances in which we try to get our way without any consideration for others. Moriarty’s novel (2014), Big Little Lies, is argued to represent the patterns of aggressive communications. This study aims to find out the motivations behind aggressive language in familial communication in this best-seller novel. It aims to identify the pragmatic strategies that are utilized to convey aggression in the data under scrutiny. As aggression is a critical social issue, it is studied in terms of the critical pragmatic paradigm. It is hypothesized that aggression is motivated by psychological factors and negative speech acts as well as impoliteness characterize all instances of aggressive communications. The analysis of data verified the two set hypotheses.