Flouting Multiple Maxims The Analysis on a Situation which Flouts Maxims
56 As appeared to be humorous indicated by canned laughter in the excerpt
above, Lily successfully seduced Marshall as she looked hot in her stunning dress. Despite she had good reason to ask a question, she tested him under her guise of
friendship. Hence, she would expect Marshall to provide adequate response to her face-valued question. However, Marshall owned the exchange boundaries. He
could obey the maxim by spelling out truthfully what he was feeling towards Lily’s dinner outfit which clued to embarrassment or he lied to save his face. Structurally,
both Lily and Marshall happened to have a common question-answer sequence in conversation, yet Marshall’s response to Lily’s inquiry was liable to mislead by
untruthfully putting the blame on the roll in the table. Marshall expected Lily to take the face value meaning from his utterance because he wanted to hide the truth
Thomas, 1995, p. 73. In terms of the CP, the followed-up move produced by Marshall constituted a violation of the maxim of quality.
2 Uttering ironical sentences
Violating maxim of quality discovered from the data was irony as transpired in the following excerpt:
S02E06QLVL5
1 Druthers: what do you think, Ted? It just let itself out of its plastic case and rolled away? -
- Somebody stole it. 2
Ted: Well, um I better get back to these Styrofoam trees. 3
Druthers: Oh, who cares about the trees? It’s just busy work to make you feel like you’re contributing.
4
Ted: Inspiring as always, sir.
The excerpt above was discovered to be a result of violating maxim of quality. The conversation happened when Hammond Druthers, a manager of a
company where Ted hired, got mad because he lost his baseball. In the earlier time, Ted was in charged to do a project from Druthers, which was to make a set of trees
57 from Styrofoam. When Ted showed Druthers the result, rather than appreciating it,
Druthers seemed to depreciate it. As the exchange, Ted said insincere utterance “Inspiring as always, sir.” Structurally, the conversation happened to have a
question-answer sequence at first. Druthers drew the supposition that somebody must have stolen the baseball. For current purpose exchange, Ted was supposed to
concern it, otherwise he rather spelled out dispreffered with the prefaces “well” and the initial hesitation “umm” to delay his disregarding sentence. Subsequently, it was
followed by Druthers’ insensitive response upon Ted’s project. In view of the fact that Druthers was the manager, Ted confronted him with a compliment. The
compliment, however, was not sent from the bottom of the hurt but the lip. Ted expected the utterance to be taken at its surface value. Ted made up the compliment
to satisfy Druthers by deluding Druthers a false compliment. The turn taken by Ted resulted an utterance which in terms of CP constituted the violation maxim of
quality Tupan and Natalia, 2008, p. 64. 3
Providing less assured information As was transpired, the speaker from the following excerpt was known to
violate maxim of quality. It showed that maxim of quality was done by simply concealing the truth to safe face which in terms of CP, the speaker violated the first
sub maxim of quality.
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Marshall got three slaps. One because he lied and two for being prematurely slapped. 1
Barney: Oh, my God. Are you gonna cry?
2
Marshall: No. – You’re gonna cry.
From the above excerpt, the conversation structurally occurred shortly after Marshall got three slaps from Barney since he failed the gamble. The adjacency pair