Maxim and flouting the maxim.
This text is taken from conversation of student at 1st grade at university.
Researcher : What’s your name?
Addressee : My name is Nisa.
Researcher : What class are you in?
Addressee : Enrichment.
Researcher : Have you got a writing class, maybe?
Addressee : Yes.
Researcher : Who is the lecturer.
Addressee : Mr. Erwin Oktoma.
Researcher : Okay, I want to know the material
that you have learned in the writing class, can you give explanation of a
material of it, just a little bit maybe?
Addressee : Passive voice, causative,
conditional sentense.
Researcher : Do you like writting?
Addressee : Yes I like but i cant write english
well.
According to the conversation above, I would like to
analysis the text using maxim theory. In the conversation of second turn of the
addresse there is a mistake or
unsuitable answer of the question :
Researcher : What class are you in?
Addressee : Enrichment.
The researcher in the text wants to know
grade oh the student, not about the class that student is taking, so the
addressee should answer first grade, second or third grade. So based on the
case, the addresse in context is flouting maxim of relevance. The maxim
of relevance -- originally called the 'maxim of relation' by Grice (1975)
-- is one of Grice's four conversational maxims,
which jointly constitute the cooperative principle.
Grice (1975: 47) defines it as follows: "I expect a partner’s contribution
to be appropriate to immediate needs at each stage of the transaction".
Leech (1983:
94) provides the following definition of the notion of relevance: "An
utterance U is relevant to a speech situation if U can be interpreted as
contributing to the conversational goal(s) of speaker or hearer". Leech
states that the speaker strives for a certain goal by stating his question and
that the hearer adopts this goal when giving an answer.
Example
In many cases
the relevance of an answer needs to be inferred on the basis of information
from the context. Leech (1983: 94) provides the following example:
A: Where is my box of
chocolates?
B: It’s in your room.
can be compared to
A: Where is my box of
chocolates?
B: The children were in your
room this morning.
B’s
contribution in the first example abides by the maxim of relevance, since a
direct and appropriate answer to the question is given. B’s answer in the
second example appears not to be relevant to the question at first sight.
However, the second example could still be relevant to the speaker. A will
assume that B abides by the cooperative principle and will therefore infer that
specific implied meanings are being conveyed. In the example given, such
implicatures could be that the children may have eaten the chocolate, or that
the children may know where the chocolate is, as they were in A’s room.
According to
Grice, the maxim of relevance cannot easily be flouted, as speakers will always
try to establish a relation to preceding discourse, or extract metalinguistic
information from an utterance. Grice (1975: 54) discusses the following
example:
A: Mrs. X is an old bag.
B: The weather has been quite
delightful this summer, hasn’t it?
The maxim of
relevance appears to be flouted, but B's utterance is nonetheless interpretable
in context, as the communicative intention conveyed in this case is a change of
subject.
The principle of relevance constitutes the basis of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986), who interpret the term differently from Grice, however.
We can see the other flouting maxim in the conversation such as :
Researcher : Okay, I want to know the material that you
have learned in the writing class, can you give explanation of a material of it,
just a little bit maybe?
Addressee : Passive voice, causative, conditional
sentense.
It
is flouting maxim of relevance also, because between the question and the
answer does not relate. The porpose of question of the researcher is to find in formation of a material in
addressee’s writing class and explain it just a little bit. But the addressee
told about other information which not related to the desire of researcher’s
question. The correct answer could be explained about passive voice only not
about the other.
And
the last flouting of the conversation can be analysed from the last
conversation like :
Researcher : Do you like writting?
Addressee : Yes I like but i cant write english
well.
Based on the conversation
above, there is flouting maxim of quantity, because the answer doesn’t need reason
of the addressee, cause form of the question is yes-no question. We can see the
explanation of the maxim is Grice's Maxim, maxim of quantity. To be
``as informative as required'', an utterance must (most of the time...) at
least be informative at all. We can get a grip on this minimal
requirement using inference. The key idea is that an utterance must contain
something new to be informative. And to count as something new logically, the
content of the utterance must not be implied by the preceding discourse anyway.
We know that if it is implied, the implication with the preceding
discourse as antecedent and the (not so) new utterance as consequent will be
valid.
REFERENCE
Grice, H.P.
(1975). Logic and conversation. In: P. Cole and J.L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax
and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, 41-58. New York: Academic Press.
Grundy,
Peter. (2008). Doing Pragmatic.
London: British Library.
Leech, G. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Sperber, Dan
& Deirdre Wilson (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd
ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
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