Rhetorical Strategies in flouting Grice’s Maxims as Found in “Pygmalion”.

Hartanto, Yenny (2013) Rhetorical Strategies in flouting Grice’s Maxims as Found in “Pygmalion”. In: Language Maintenance and Shift III, 2-3 Juli 2013, Semarang.

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Abstract

Communication is an separable part of human life because people need to express their ideas, feeling ,and thought to one another. Ideally in a communication, the speaker should fulfill the requirements of the message being informative, clear, and relevant to achieve successful conversation. Moreover Grice identified the conversational cooperation into cooperative principles that cover four maxims: quantity, quality, relation, and manner. Cooperative principles are principles of cooperation in any utterance or conversation which have to be obeyed and fulfilled by the speakers to achieve an effective communication. However, in a real conversation, there is a tendency that the speaker does not follow the cooperative principles. The reason is that the speaker has certain goals or certain reasons such as for the sake of politeness, time efficiency, persuasion, and the like. Borrowing Grice’s term, the speaker flouts Grice’s maxims. The maxims are flouted usually by means of indirect, and contradictory utterances, of figures of speech such as irony, metaphor, understatement or litotes, hyperbole or overstatement, rhetorical question, and tautology. These kinds of communication strategy are called rhetorical strategies. The use of rhetorical strategies in flouting conversational maxims in this study is represented by the main characters’ utterances of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. There are three main characters in the drama, namely (1) Professor Higgins, (2) Eliza Doolittle, and (3) Alfred Doolittle. The general research problem to be answered is “What type of rhetorical strategies are used by the main characters in flouting Grice’s maxims as found in Pygmalion?” This general question is specifically formulated as follows: (1) What type of rhetorical strategy is the most frequently used?, (2) What maxim is the most dominantly flouted? To answer the research problem, the writer uses qualitative-content analysis. The source of data of this study is a play entitled Pygmalion, while the data are the main characters’ utterances on the basis of the research problems. The key instrument of this study is the researcher herself. To analyze and finally get the research findings, the writer uses Mile’s and Huberman’s data analysis and triangulation to avoid the subjectivity of the result. On the basis of the data analysis, it is found that three main characters flout the maxims of conversation by means of rhetorical strategies which involve tautology, metaphor, overstatement, understatement, rhetorical questions, and irony. Meanwhile, they flout Grice’s maxims as expressed in their utterances. The maxims flouted are in the maxim of quantity, the maxim of quality, and the maxim of manner.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords: rhetorical strategies, flouting, Grice’s maxims
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PE English
Divisions: Research Center > Language Center
Depositing User: Eko Setiawan 194014
Date Deposited: 05 Jul 2013 09:29
Last Modified: 05 Jul 2013 09:29
URI: http://repository.ubaya.ac.id/id/eprint/3493

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