The Gricean Cooperative Principle: Flouting And Hedging in the Conversations in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. (Thesis)
| Main Author: | Sri Ningsih Maria Goretti |
|---|---|
| Format: | PeerReviewed |
| Bahasa: | ind |
| Terbitan: |
, 2009
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: |
http://karya-ilmiah.um.ac.id/index.php/disertasi/article/view/1211 |
Daftar Isi:
- The Cooperative Principle (CP) was proposed by a philosopher, H.P. Grice. The principle states that a speaker should be cooperative by making the conversational contribution as required in the talk exchange. Grice proposed four conversational maxims which speakers should abide: (1) Maxim of Quantity, that is, to make the contribution as informative as required, and not to make it more informative than is required, (2) Maxim of Quality, that is, not to say what the speaker believes to be false and not to say things that the speaker lacks evidence, (3) Maxim of Relation, which tells speakers to be relevant, and (4) Maxim of Manner, which tells speakers to be perspicuous: (a) avoid obscurity, (b) avoid ambiguity, (c) be brief, and (d) be orderly. In real world, speakers do not always abide the four maxims mentioned above. In other words they often flout and/or hedge the maxims. Flouting the maxims means that speakers violate the conversational maxims, while hedging the maxims means that the speakers do not want to be committed on the substance of the utterance. Flouting is often done through figurative language. This research tries to describe how the characters in The Secret Agent flout and/or hedge the conversational maxims. It is elaborated into: (1) the description of kinds of conversational maxims flouted and/or hedged in the conversations, (2) explanation of the distribution of the flouting and hedging, (3) the description of the speakers' reasons for using the flouting and hedging, and (4) the description of the grammatical patterns of the flouting and hedging. The description of kinds of conversational maxims flouted and/or hedged in the conversations and the explanation of the distribution of the flouting and hedging are based on Grice's conversational maxims; the description of the speakers' reasons for using flouting and hedging is based on the Cooperative Principle (CP) proposed by Grice and the Politeness Principles (PP) by Leech; while the description of the grammatical patterns of the flouting and hedging is based on the parts of the sentence which flout/hedge the maxims. In order to answer the research problems, a qualitative research was done. The data were collected from the characters' conversations containing six figures of speech mentioned in Grundy (2000): irony, metaphor, overstatement, rhetorical question, tautology, and understatement. The results show that there are five kinds of figurative language used in the conversations in the novel, and the most frequently used figure of speech is metaphor (83.72%), then followed by overstatement (4.65%), rhetorical question (4.65%), tautology (4.65%), and the least is irony (2.33%). It is also found that there are three kinds of conversational maxims flouted in the conversations, and maxim of Manner is the most frequently flouted in the conversations (50.73%), the second is maxim of Quality (42.03), and the last is maxim of Quantity (7.24%). While in term of grammatical patterns, most of the flouting and all of the hedging are done through the whole sentence. Based on the research findings, it is suggested that the novel can be used as material for teaching literature and cross-cultural understanding (CCU) as it presents the use of figures of speech to convey messages and thoughts, for example, "My heart went down into my boots" (p.29) and "I suppose the cup of horrors was full enough for such as me" (p.298). Those kinds of expression will enrich students' knowledge and understanding of English culture.