1 TEACHING & LEARNING ENGLISH (Theories and Practices) MUHAMMAD SUKRIANTO LOVI TRIONO ENGLISH EDUCATION POST GRADUATE PROGRAM INDONESIA UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION 2 Content Content i A Pragmatic Analysis of the Conversational Implicatures 1 Speaking Activities Implemented by Teachers in Classroom 8 Teaching English to Children 15 Pembelajaran dengan Menggunakan Media Komputer 20 Applying Contextual Instruction to involve Students with The Natural Way of Learning English 27 Students Age which EFL is Introduced in School and Educational Outcome 30 Which Students Join Whom? 34 You are Intellectuall? Write! 38 A Critical Review of “Pokoknya Sunda” 49 English Sentences 58 “Radio” The Innovation of Technology in Education 65 Ten Good Game for Recycling Vocabulary 77 The Effect of Explicit Metapragmatic Instruction on Speech Act Awareness of Advanced EFL Students 82 Students’ Vocabulary Learning Strategies 85 Encouraging Questioning In English Reading Comprehension For The Second Year Students Of Man Model Manado 90 Analyzing Total Educational Program 94 The Unique of Children 99 Teachers’ Strategies in Teaching Reading Comprehension 102 Sequence and Comment on The Story for Young Learners 105 First Sound in Child Language 109 3 A Pragmatic Analysis of The Conversational Implicatures in Today’s Dialogue on Metro TV “Thoughts on The Reshuffle” Based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Its Maxims Muhammad Sukrianto Indonesia University of Education email: sukrilusy@yahoo.com ABSTRACT It is widely argued that Grice’s theory of implicature has wide and useful applications. Based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its maxims, this study attempts to analyze pragmatically the conversational implicatures in a Today’s Dialogue program on Metro TV “Thoughts on The Reshuffle” The result shows that in the conversation, the four maxims are flouted. The maxims of relevance are frequently flouted (80, 95%) the highest score. The second frequently flouted are the maxim of quantity (76, 19%), and then followed by maxim of manner (47, 61%) and maxim of quality (6, 52%). In this analysis, we argue that the reasoning rigor of the CP and its maxims is worth respecting by linguists in general and pragmaticists in particular. Keywords: Cooperative Principle and its maxims, conversational implicatures, pragmatic analysis 1. Introduction It has been recognized that generally when we are involved in a conversation, we are cooperating with each other. In other words, when a listener hears an expression, he or she first has to assume that the speaker is being cooperative and intend to communicate something. However, in many occasion in conversation, speaker intend to communicate more than is said. It is an additional meaning or that something more than what the words means called an implicature (Yule, 1996). Conversational implicatures have become one of the principal subjects of pragmatics. According to Levinson (1983:97), the notion of conversational implicature is one of the single most important ideas in pragmatics. An implicature is something meant, implied, or suggested distinct from what is said. Implicatures can be part of sentence meaning or dependent on conversational context, and can be conventional or unconventional. Grice, who coined the term “implicature,” and classified the phenomenon, developed an influential theory to explain and predict conversational implicatures, and describe how they are understood. The “Cooperative Principle” and associated “Maxims” play a central role. Many authors have focused on principles of 4 politeness and communicative efficiency. Questions have been raised as to how well these principle-based theories account for the intentionality of speaker implicature and conventionality of sentence implicature. This study does not attempt to review either all the relevant theory or all of what is known about implicature in the world’s languages. Rather, an attempt is made to pinpoint some of the most tantalizing theoretical and descriptive problems, to sketch the way in attempts to analyze pragmatically the conversational implicatures of a conversational transcript in a Today’s Dialogue program on Metro TV “Thoughts on The Reshuffle,” based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its maxims Conversation transcript is a written text as the realizations of utterance by the participant in a conversation. A transcript has detail and complete utterances. However, the meaning of utterance in written text can also be known from its situation context within the sequence of the actions. 2. Theoretical Foundation In addition to identifying and classifying the phenomenon of implicature, Grice developed a theory designed to explain and predict conversational implicatures. He also sought to describe how such implicatures are understood. Grice postulated a general “Cooperative Principles” and four “maxims” specifying how to be cooperative It is common knowledge, he asserted, that people generally follow these rules for efficient communication. Grice’s theory of implicature is an attempt to explain how a hearer gets what is meant, from the level of expressed meaning to the level of implied meaning from what is said. In order to explain the mechanisms by which people interpret conversational implicature (Levinson 1983, Yule 1996). Grice (1967) proposed the Cooperative Principle (CP) and four conversational maxims. The CP runs as follows: make your contribution to what is required at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk in which you are engaged; to put it in another way, we assume that in a conversation, all participants, regardless of their cultural background, will cooperate with each other when making their contributions. Grice then broke this principle down into four maxims, which go towards making a speaker’s contribution to the conversation “cooperative”. (1) Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false. 5 Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. (2) Quantity: Make your contribution sufficiently informative for the current purposes of the conversation. Do not make your contribution more, or less informative than is required. (3) Relevance: Make sure that whatever you say is relevant to the conversation at hand. (4) Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression Avoid ambiguity Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity) Be orderly Grice pointed out that these maxims are not always observed, but he made a distinction between quietly violating a maxim and openly flouting a maxim. Violations are quiet in the sense that it is not obvious at the time of the utterance that the speaker has deliberately lied, supplied insufficient information, or been ambiguous, irrelevant or hard to understand. In Grice’s analysis, these violations might hamper communication but they do not lead to implicatures. What leads to implicatures is a situation where the speaker flouts a maxim. That is, it is obvious to the hearer at the time of the utterance that the speaker has deliberately and quite openly failed to observe one or more maxims. According to Grice, the implicature is made possible by the fact that we normally assume that speakers do not really abandon the cooperative principle although in conversations they sometimes face a clash between maxims. Grice viewed these rules not as arbitrary conventions, but as instances of more general rules governing rational, cooperative behavior. For example, if a woman is helping a man build a house, she will hand him a hammer rather than a tennis racket (relevance), more than one nail when several are needed (quantity), straight nails rather than bent ones (quality), and she will do all this quickly and efficiently (manner). Generalizing from the explanation above, Grice provided a theoretical account of what it is to conversationally implicate something that has been widely adopted, sometimes with subtle variations. 3. Methodology The methodology employed in this study is descriptive qualitative. A qualitative study is an inquiry process of understanding a social or human problem, based on building a complex, holistic picture, formed with words, reporting detailed views of informants, and conducted in a natural setting. (Cresswell,1994). The objective 6 of this study is to analyze pragmatically the conversational implicatures of a conversational transcript based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its maxims. The data were taken from conversation transcript of Today’s Dialogue program on Metro TV “Thoughts on The Reshuffle,” Today’s Dialogue program on Metro TV were selected since it is a formal dialogue and interesting to analyze. The process of data analysis comprises arranging, organizing, categorizing, and interpreting or giving meaning. Glaser and Strauss expressed by Strauss claim that the focus of analysis is not merely on collecting or ordering a mass of data, but on organizing many ideas which have emerged from analysis of the data (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Strauss, 1987, cited in Lynch, 1996.) 20 dialogues (questions and answers) excerpts which are taken from conversation transcript of today’s dialogue program are analyzed based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its maxims. 4. Findings And Discussion As mention earlier, based on the theoretical framework, we proceed to analyze the conversational implicatures in the questions and answers excerpts. There are 20 dialogues (questions and answers) excerpts which are taken from conversation transcript of today’s dialogue program on Metro TV. They were analyzed based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its maxims. Before we report the findings, we want to clarify a point that implicatures are used only for the purpose of expressing intended meaning on behalf of the speaker, which can be conveyed by flouting one maxim while prominently upholding another, and which can be worked out by the hearer. The findings are drawn as follow: Table 1. The Maxims Flouted in Conversation No The Maxims flouted Dialogues Frequency (%) 1. Maxim of Quality 17, 18 2 (9, 52%) 2. Maxim of Quantity 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20. 16 (76, 19%) 4. Maxim of Relation (Relevance) 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20. 17 (80, 95%) 5. Maxim of Manner 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 10 (47, 61%) 7 Based on the table above, in the conversation the four maxims are flouted. The maxims of relevance are frequently flouted (80, 95%) the highest score. 17 out of 20 dialogues flouted this maxim. The second frequently flouted are the maxim of quantity (76, 19%), and then followed by maxim of manner (47, 61%) and maxim of quality (6, 52%). These maxims are considered to be flouted based on the category and the characteristic given by Grace (1967). In accordance with the finding above, we chose some segments of the conversation to analyze. Most of dialogues flouted the maxim of relevance and maxim of quantity. According to Thomas (1995) the maxim of relation is exploited by making a response or observation which is very obviously irrelevant to the topic in hand. Let see the example in dialogue 4 (see the appendix): Meutia: Pak Darwin, do you also think there should be a reshuffle? Darwin: Whether we are talking about a government or a company, it is natural that personalities are judged in line with the targets that have been reached. If we are objective, we can see that many targets have been reached by ministers. The problem is really one of perception. If you don’t want to say any minister’s names, then at least give the portfolios they are responsible for. In the above example, the maxim of relation (Be relevant) is exploited by making a response or observation which is very obviously irrelevant to the question in hand (e.g., by abruptly changing the subject, or by overtly failing to address the other person’s goal on asking a question). Examples of flouting the maxim of Relevance by changing the subject or by failing to address the topic directly are encountered very frequently. In this example, Darwin makes a response which is truthful, clear, etc., however it is not relevant with Mutiah’s question. What it does not do is to address Mutiah’s goal in asking the question: she wants to know whether Pak Darwin, think there should be a reshuffle. This dialogue also flouts maxim quantity and manner since it blatantly gives more informative response and obscurity of expression. Let see another example in dialogue 7: Meutia: The SBY administration is already halfway through its term. Pak Eko, why is it so urgent to have a reshuffle now? Eko: The public are demanding one. In the above excerpt, Eko’s response appears to flout the maxim of Quantity. There is less information to answer Mutiah’s question. A flout of the maxim of quantity occurs when a speaker blatantly gives more or less information than the situation . (Relevance) 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 20. 17 (80, 95%) 5. Maxim of Manner 4, 6, 7, 8, 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 16 , 10 (47, 61% ) 7 Based. Frequency (%) 1. Maxim of Quality 17 , 18 2 (9, 52%) 2. Maxim of Quantity 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20. 16 (76, 19 %) 4. Maxim