Infringing Maxim of Quality

77 EXCERPT S02E15QNFL12 SI On the sale, wedding dress store, robin and lily. Lily has been wanting to buy wedding dress on sale but she didn’t knew the place. NA Conversation 1 Robin: This is the place. 2 Lily: Oh, wow. Badgley Mischka Melissa Sweet Vera Wang Oh, Robin, do you have any idea what you guys stumbled onto here? 3 Robin: giggling You said Wang. SO Flouting maxim of quantity LM Missing link TA Family name of a designer LA Natural do not correspondent to the production of humor As appeared in the excerpt above, the punchline came out from Robin within a conversation NA between Robin and Lily. The conversation occurred SI when Lily was delirious to run into a wedding dress on sale in a store. Lily’s question was considered as part of speech figure which to make a point rather than to elicit an answer. At this point, Robin’s follow-up utterance was not necessarily aired. The humor laid on Robin’s utterance because she uttered other informative utterance for current purpose of conversation. Consequently, she flouted maxim of quantity. In terms of script opposition SO it constituted an abnormal behavior. The logical mechanism LM then follows as ground reversal since the expected situation in current conversation changes into unexpected one as in Robin’s utterance. The humorous effects were created when the perceivers, explicitly audiences, have the conceptual patterns which formed variable expectation of what might be Robin’s responses in exchange to Lily’s inquiry. The formed expectation was based on, in this given situation: topic discussed, Lily’s tone of voice, and Lily’s gesture. Those factors formed the expectation that Robin would be as delirious as Lily was. Unpredictably, Robin’s conflicting utterance violated the audiences’ concept Morreal, 1987. As a result, it gave a rise to amusement. 78

b. Violating

Violating maxim of quantity was produced when the speaker blatantly deceived the hearer by uttering either too little or too much amount of information. The following excerpt would suffice to explain how the utterances discovered to be humorous: EXCERPT S02E22QNVL9 SI Empire State Building with Katy, Robin’s younger sister. NA Conversation 1 Barney: Oh, like First Corinthians? That Bible verse? They do that at every wedding. 2 Robin: How’s it go? Everyone starting to listen to Marshall 3 Marshall: “Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things… endures all things.” 4 Robin: Lame. 5 Lily: Going on the list. SO Violating maxim of quantity LM Ground-role reversal TA Bible Verse LA Understating: ‘lame’ The humorous situation above sprang up within a conversation NA among Barney, Lily, Marshall and Robin. The situation SI occurred when Lily was listing things a couple of marriage usually do in a wedding. Barney initiated a turn to suggest a Bible verse to be on the list. The script opposition SO occurred as Robin understate LA that Bible verse as ‘lame’. In terms of CP, her utterance constituted the violation maxim of quantity. Subsequently, the logical mechanism LM came across soon after maxim of quantity was violated. In this situation, the characters especially Robin typically had a behavior of modern realistic citizen which strayed from the norm. The Bible verse usually cited in a wedding was supposed to be valued, it was not to be grasped as a cliché. Such behavior then conflicted to what audiences’ had in mind about how the characters in the conversation ought to