Method Object of the Study Unit of Analysis

33

CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHOD

This chapter discusses the research methodology adopted by the present study. The main aspects of the research discuss: research design, object of the study, unit of analysis, method of data collection and method of data analysis.

3.1 Method

This study is using a descriptive one since it describes a situation or area of interest systematically, factually and accurately Isaac Michael, 1971: 42. This study also uses the qualitative method, which is a research procedure that results in descriptive data in the form of written and it doesn’t depend on the statistic of the data. By using this descriptive qualitative method, the writer shows the implicatures in written humors based on Grice’s theory of implicatures.

3.2 Object of the Study

The object of the study is written humors in Reader’s Digest. The data are collected in such a way according to the limitation of the study. As has been stated in Chapter 1, the study is restricted to the written humors collected from Reader’s Digest of January to May 2005. The written humors are taken, is from “As Kids See it”, “All in Day’s Work”, “Laughter for the Best Medicine” and “Life’s Like That”. And there are 127 written humors in Reader’s Digest of January to May 2005. From those written humors, I only took 34 humors as the data which focus on the humors violating the Cooperative Principle.

3.3 Unit of Analysis

In this study, the unit of analysis is utterances which contain conversational implicature in written humor. And this is an example of the written humor from Reader’s Digest; The professor of my sociology class University of British Colombia asked me, “What’s the opposite of nomadic?” After a pause, one of my classmate suggested, “Madic.” The utterance “After a pause, one of my classmates suggests, “Madic” has assertive function which means to assert that the opposite ‘Nomadic’ is ‘Madic’. It violates maxim of quality because the student gives wrong answer. Actually the student doesn’t know the answer. He answers “Madic” based on phoneme structure or morphological structure from the word “no madic”, not based on the meaning of the word. He sees word “nomadic” is from English negation which is the opposite of “Madic” by erasing “no”. He should answer the opposite of the word “Nomadic” is from the meaning of the word itself, it is not from the morphological structure of the word. The utterance which violates maxim of quality causes conversational implicature. The inference of the violation can be concluded that he just wants to make the situation of the class more relax, to reduce the suspense which at that time no body can’t answer the question from the Professor. Whereas he doesn’t really know the opposite of the word “Nomadic” and he is not sure of his answer. He answers the question is from the form of morphological structure of the word.

3.4 Role of Researcher