Advanced Writing (Academic Essay)

Conversational Maxims
in Casual Conversation by English Students

Muhammad Aulia Taufiqi

auliataufiqi@gmail.com

Universitas Negeri Semarang

Introduction

In daily communication, conversation will occur in various style. The ways in delivering the messages in conversation are developing through the ages. Levinson (1983: 284) defined conversation as the familiar kind of talk in which two or more participants freely alternate in speaking, which generally occurs outside specific institutional settings like religious services, law courts, classrooms, and the like. In understanding the messages conveyed in the daily conversation, it is needed that we learn and study about one of an idea in pragmatics which called conversational implicature. Levinson (1983:101) described conversational implicatures as “a nonconventional implicature based on an addressee’s assumption that the speaker is following the conversational maxims or at least the cooperative principle”. In producing a good conversation, participants need to understand each other’s meaning of the utterance. That is why the participants tend to follow the cooperative principle and the conversational maxim by giving enough, true, related, and arranged utterance which is assumed as explicit information. In the other hand, conversational implicature tends to flout the conversational maxim. Grice (1975) categorized the cooperative principle of conversation and elaborates it in four sub-principles: (1) maxim of quantity, (2) maxim of quality, (3) maxim of relation, and (4) maxim of manner. Yule (1996: 37) says that it is important to recognize these maxims as unstated assumptions we have in conversation.

Many participants of conversation, sometimes, are difficult to understand the meaning that assumed from the flouted conversational maxim in the conversation implicature. They need some effort to understand the meaning and sometimes they clarify to the speaker about what they intend to. As the result of the case, not all of the hearer (interlocutor) could follow and refer to what the speaker means. That is why it is very important to the hearer to see the context of which the conversation occurred. Talking about conversation is also talking about context. As stated by Yule (1996: 3) that pragmatics is the study of contextual meaning. So, talking about pragmatics is also talking about context. Context itself according to Leech (1983: 13) is the relevant aspect of the physical or social setting of utterance. It is a background knowledge assumed to be shared by speaker and addressee. The contexts help the hearer to imply the meaning in the conversation occurred. The study of pragmatics especially conversational implicature has been built by people as the influence of conversational implicature and conversational maxims which were created by Yule (1996) and Grice (1975). This study conducted to figure out the types of conversational maxim which are appeared and flouted in casual conversational done by the English students of Graduate Program (UNNES).