xxxi
d. Flouting Maxim of Manner
Ambrose : What will you do after getting up in the morning?”
Albert : “I will have my breakfast, but before that I will take a shower and brush my teeth.”
Albert flouts the Maxim of Manner because he provides the answer which is not arranged orderly.
From the examples above, we know how people flout the maxims which guide the conversation in order to effective and efficient. The flouting one or
more than one maxims will lead to the communication which is not effective and efficient. However, flouting maxims of conversation is sometimes
considered as correct way whenever direct answer which is effective and efficient is not sufficiently answer the question. Through this paper, I want to
show to the readers in what way flouting maxims of conversation of an answer becomes the most appropriate answer of a question.
2. Violating a maxim
Many commentators incorrectly use the term ‘violate’ for all forms of non-observance of the maxims. Grice in Thomas 1995, p.73 defines
‘Violation’ very specifically as the unostentatious non observance of a maxim. If a speaker violates a maxim, he will be liable to mislead. Consider the
example:
xxxii Alice has been refusing to make love to her husband. At first, the husband
attributes this to the depression, but then he starts to think she may be having affair.
“Allie. I’ve got to ask you this.” He stopped.
“Ask me then-“ “Will you give me a truthful answer? However much you think it’ll hurt me?”
Alice’s voice had a little quaver. “I promise.”
Martin came back to his chair and put his hands on its back and looked at her. “is There another man?”
Alice raised her chin and looked at him squarely. “No,” she said. “There isn’t another man.”
And then Martin gave a long, escaping sigh, and grinned at her and said he thought they had better finish the champagne, didn’t she? Taken from
Thomas.1995, p.73 It is later established that Alice’s assertion that she is not having an affair
with another man is true, but not the whole truth she is, in fact, having an affair with a woman. In fact, there is nothing in formulation of Alice’s response which
would allow Martin to deduce that she was withholding information. This
xxxiii unostentatious violation of the Maxim of Quantity generates the intentionally
misleading Implicature that Alice is not having an affair with anyone. 3.
Infringing a Maxim Thomas 1995, p.74 states that Infringing the maxim is the type of non-
observance which could occur because the speaker has an imperfect command of the language a young child or a foreign learner, because the speaker’s
performance is impaired in some way nervousness, drunkenness, excitement, because of some cognitive impairment, or simply because the speaker is
constitutionally incapable of speaking clearly, to the point, etc. One of the examples of the incapability of speaking clearly is how the Australian people
say “today” which is pronounced as if “to die”. See the illustration below: A
: “Where will you go to Bali”? B
: “Today”. Pronounced to die There is no intended Implicature that B wants to convey, what is happened
is just the inability to say something clearly which comes to the misunderstanding of the hearer.
4. Opting out of a Maxim
Thomas 1995, p.74 defines opting out as the observing a maxim by indicating unwillingness to cooperate in the way the maxim requires. Example
of opting out occurs frequently in public life, when the speaker can not, perhaps for legal or ethical reasons, reply in the way normally expected. In this case, the
xxxiv speaker flouts the Maxim of Quality because he does not provide the answer
which is true and does not lack of evidence. The motive for doing so is the ethical reason. For example, there is an accident of ravishment, the journalists
and the police officers will keep the name of the victim for the reason of ethical because it is a must that every journalist and police officer respects the victim’s
privacy. See the following example of the headline news:
“A”, the woman being the victim of violation, was killed last night by her husband.
5. Suspending a Maxim
Grice in Thomas 1995, p.77 states that Suspension of the maxim may be culture-specific or specific to particular events. We can see that, culture specific
becomes the reason why someone fails to observe maxim in his expression, and this phenomenon has the motive for doing so. In Javanese culture, the motive
for suspending is because of taboo. In this society, whenever someone dies, it is taboo for mentioning the cause of the death in front of people. Javanese people
prefer to say the character or the goodness of the death than to mention what makes the man dies although all people knows that the man dies because of the
victim of robbery.
2.6 SPEAKING Theory
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