FLOUTING THE GRICE’S MAXIMS FOUND IN MR. POPPERS’ PENGUINS MOVIE

Abstract

People engaged in the conversation commonly shared the principles of conversation which lead them to interpret each other’s utterances, as the contribution to a conversation. According to Grice, cooperative principle that commonly used in the conversation consists of four maxims, they are: maxim of quantity, quality, relation, and manner. When people didn’t cooperate each other in conversation, they actually broke the maxims. Grice classified them into violation, flouting, infringing, opting out, and suspending. This study is focused on the flouting of maxims. The study used descriptive qualitative approach to investigate a conversational phenomenon taken from a movie, ‘Mr. Popper’s Penguin’ directed by Mark Waters. The technique of collecting data applied in this study was by taking the samples of utterance in the conversation among the characters, involves: picking up the relevant utterances, identifying and classifying the data. While the data analysis involved: figuring out how flouting the maxims take place, and interpreting what the speakers actually try to convince, including the implicatures. The result of the study showed that maxim of quality and quantity were flouted 5x or 29.4%, maxim of relation was flouted 4x or 23.6%, and the last maxim of manner was flouted 3x or 17.6%.  

Keywords:      Cooperative Principle (CP), flouting the maxims and implicature.