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A Pragmatic Analysis of The Conversational Implicatures in Today’s Dialogue on Metro TV “Thoughts on The Reshuffle”
Based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Its Maxims
Muhammad Sukrianto Indonesia University of Education
email: sukrilusyyahoo.com
ABSTRACT
It is widely argued that Grice’s theory of implicature has wide and useful applications. Based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its maxims, this
study attempts to analyze pragmatically the conversational implicatures in a Today’s Dialogue program on Metro TV “Thoughts on The Reshuffle”
The result shows that in the conversation, the four maxims are flouted. The maxims of relevance are frequently flouted 80, 95
the highest score. The second frequently flouted are the maxim of quantity 76, 19, and then followed by maxim of manner 47,
61 and maxim of quality 6, 52.
In this analysis, we argue that the reasoning rigor of the CP and its maxims is worth respecting by linguists in
general and pragmaticists in particular.
Keywords: Cooperative Principle and its maxims, conversational implicatures, pragmatic analysis
1. Introduction
It has been recognized that generally when we are involved in a conversation, we are cooperating with each other. In other words, when a listener hears an expression,
he or she first has to assume that the speaker is being cooperative and intend to communicate something. However, in many occasion in conversation, speaker intend to
communicate more than is said. It is an additional meaning or that something more than what the words means called an implicature Yule, 1996.
Conversational implicatures have become one of the principal subjects of pragmatics. According to Levinson 1983:97, the notion of conversational implicature
is one of the single most important ideas in pragmatics. An implicature is something meant, implied, or suggested distinct from what is said. Implicatures can be part of
sentence meaning or dependent on conversational context, and can be conventional or unconventional. Grice, who coined the term “implicature,” and classified the
phenomenon, developed an influential theory to explain and predict conversational implicatures, and describe how they are understood. The “Cooperative Principle” and
associated “Maxims” play a central role. Many authors have focused on principles of
4 politeness and communicative efficiency. Questions have been raised as to how well
these principle-based theories account for the intentionality of speaker implicature and conventionality of sentence implicature.
This study does not attempt to review either all the relevant theory or all of what is known about implicature in the world’s languages. Rather, an attempt is made to
pinpoint some of the most tantalizing theoretical and descriptive problems, to sketch the way in attempts to analyze pragmatically the conversational implicatures of
a conversational transcript
in a Today’s Dialogue program on Metro TV “Thoughts on The Reshuffle,” based
on Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its maxims
Conversation transcript is a written text as the realizations of utterance by the participant in a conversation. A transcript has detail and complete utterances. However,
the meaning of utterance in written text can also be known from its situation context within the sequence of the actions.
2. Theoretical Foundation
