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
In addition to identifying and classifying the phenomenon of implicature, Grice developed a theory designed to explain and predict conversational implicatures. He also
sought to describe how such implicatures are understood. Grice postulated a general “Cooperative Principles” and four “maxims” specifying how to be cooperative It is
common knowledge, he asserted, that people generally follow these rules for efficient communication.
Grice’s theory of implicature is an attempt to explain how a hearer gets what is meant, from the level of expressed meaning to the level of implied meaning from what
is said. In order to explain the mechanisms by which people interpret conversational implicature Levinson 1983, Yule 1996.
Grice 1967 proposed the Cooperative Principle CP and four conversational maxims. The CP runs as follows: make your contribution to what is required at the stage
at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk in which you are engaged; to put it in another way, we assume that in a conversation, all participants,
regardless of their cultural background, will cooperate with each other when making their contributions. Grice then broke this principle down into four maxims, which go
towards making a speaker’s contribution to the conversation “cooperative”. 1 Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false.
5 Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
2 Quantity: Make your contribution sufficiently informative for the current purposes of the conversation. Do not make your contribution more, or less informative than is
required. 3 Relevance: Make sure that whatever you say is relevant to the conversation at hand.
4 Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression Avoid ambiguity
Be brief avoid unnecessary prolixity Be orderly
Grice pointed out that these maxims are not always observed, but he made a distinction between quietly violating a maxim and openly flouting a maxim. Violations
are quiet in the sense that it is not obvious at the time of the utterance that the speaker has deliberately lied, supplied insufficient information, or been ambiguous, irrelevant or
hard to understand. In Grice’s analysis, these violations might hamper communication but they do not lead to implicatures. What leads to implicatures is a situation where the
speaker flouts a maxim. That is, it is obvious to the hearer at the time of the utterance that the speaker has deliberately and quite openly failed to observe one or more maxims.
According to Grice, the implicature is made possible by the fact that we normally assume that speakers do not really abandon the
cooperative principle although in conversations they sometimes face a clash between maxims.
Grice viewed these rules not as arbitrary conventions, but as instances of more general rules governing rational, cooperative behavior. For example, if a woman is
helping a man build a house, she will hand him a hammer rather than a tennis racket relevance, more than one nail when several are needed quantity, straight nails rather
than bent ones quality, and she will do all this quickly and efficiently manner. Generalizing from the explanation above, Grice provided a theoretical account
of what it is to conversationally implicate something that has been widely adopted, sometimes with subtle variations.
3. Methodology
