Flouting Conversational Maxims In COVID -19 Pandemic Texts

Abstract

Pragmatically speaking, to facilitate communication, speakers must adhere to the cooperative principle, which is comprised of four conversational maxims. They are the maxim of quality, the maxim of quantity, the maxim of manner, and the maxim of relevance. Therefore, speakers must follow these maxims to establish an effective conversation free of misunderstandings. However, speakers occasionally flout the maxims to convey an underlying message, i.e., to generate an implicature. Thus, by breaking the maxims, the participants in a conversation are not considered uncooperative because maxim flouting is a technique for directing the listener's attention towards the speaker's implicit meaning. Therefore, this research aims to identify the conversational maxims flouted in texts discussing the COVID-19 pandemic as well as determining the types of conversational implicature arising from this flouting. Conversational implicatures included both particularized and generalized implicatures, including scalar and clausal implicatures. The study used Gices' (1975) and Levinson's (2000) models to analyze the texts.