28 Discovered data has the suspension of maxim within a joke uttered by Ted
in the following excerpt:
S0208SP01
20 Barney: A cougar. An older woman, usually in her 40s or fifties, single and on the
prowl for a younger man, Ted: What’s a women in her sixties or 70s—a turtle?
5 Infringing Maxims
Infringement occurs when a speaker fails to observe the maxim, although the speaker has no intention of generating an implicature and deceiving the hearer.
Thomas 1995, p. 74 explains that generally infringing rooted from imperfect linguistic performance in the case of a young child or foreigner or from impaired
linguistic performance triggered by nervousness, drunkenness, excitement, disability. The following excerpt exemplifies an account of infringement triggered
by nervousness:
21 A: Do you have any difficulties in conducting the research?
B: Emm… a little. But there is a when understand, I mean when I try understand the meaning of words.
Moreover, drunkenness infringes maxim of manner as appeared in the following humorous conversation:
22
Robin talking to the waiter: I’d take you with gravy. If my boyfriend wasn’t sitting right here. – Just kidding. I’m good.
Lily: What are you so chirpy about? Ted: She’s still drunk from last night.
Robin: I don’t think so. Whoo
B. Theoretical Framework
The research lays the emphasis on the contribution of the non-observances maxim in connection with humor -- fashioning the humorous situation as seemed
in TV-series How I Met Your Mother Season 2. Although, not all humorous
29 phenomena can be explained by the cooperative principle e.g. humor from physical
behavior and even when we are dealing with the conversational jokes e.g. humor at lexical or phonetic levels. Nevertheless, several linguists Attardo, 1997;
Norrick, 1993; Raskin, 1985 have been trying to make a general pragmatic explanation on humor with reference to Grice’s theory. Raskin 1985 suggested
that joke-telling mode of communication non bona fide is still governed by the cooperative principle because he believed that humor is communicative functions.
This research takes the pragmatic view to discuss humorous conversational interaction. Thus, conversation is to be the model of interpretation. Fundamentally,
this research put the language into a context-through with a more full contextual analysis of humor which the context of conversation is given. Although, the built
characters in recorded data of conversation vary in characterization, background knowledge, interests and concerns, still, conversation is a flexible text negotiated
between the various participants in a conversation as found in the data. In this research, laughter serves as the most identifiable signal for identifying humor in the
text cf. Archakis Tsakona, 2005. Hay 2001, p. 56 adds that the presence of laughter is used to characterize an utterance or a text as humorous.
Since the humor in situation comedy lays on its narration, the script is styled and fashioned to be so much alike with natural language in order to illustrate daily
life conversation. The amusement itself is found from conversational interaction among the characters. Accordingly, it is necessary to hire conversation theories:
cooperative principle from Paul Grice and basic structure of conversation. The cooperative principle, which derived into four maxims principle, helps to evaluate
