AN ANALYSIS OF CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE IN “OH, BROTHERS!” COMIC STRIP SERIALS

Abstract

This study aims to describe the types of conversational implicature and the violation maxim occurs in the “Oh, Brothers! Comic strips serials. They are two mainly theories used, the conversational implicature proposed by Yule (1996) and the cooperative principles proposed by Grice (1975).  This research applies descriptive qualitative method. The objects of the research are the utterances containing implicature in 30 serials of “Oh, Brother!”. The finding of the research shows that there are 36 conversational implicature which is classified into 5 data for Generalized Implicature and 31 data for Particularized Implicature. For the Violations of Maxims, the finding shows that there are 43violation. They are  9 data for Maxim of Quality, 13 data for Maxim of Quantity, 9 data for Maxim of Relevance and 12 data for Maxim of Manner. Particularized Implicature can be identified when the readers rely on the context of the comic to interpret the meaning, while Generalized Implicature occurs when the utterance convey the whole meaning of the implicature, so the readers do not need to rely much on the context to interpret it. According to the Cooperative Principle point of view, the Violations of Maxims can be varyingly used to infer the implication of the utterance. The writer concludes that, the violations are used to: (1) deliberately persuade the addresser to infer some implications: (2) showing irrelevance understanding between speaker’s background knowledge and the addresser’s: (3) deceiving the addresser to hide something.

 Keywords: Conversational Implicature, Particularized and Generalized Implicature, Violation of Maxims.