Flouting The Cooperative Principle in I Am Sam Movie

Abstract

Conversational implicature is one of topics in pragmatics study. Conversation that happens between speaker and listener usually includes deep meaning that different from the structural meaning. Thus, the focus of this study is to describe and explain the flouting of cooperative principles in conversational implicature. The objectives of this study are: to describe what maxims are flouted by the characters in I am Sam movie and why the characters flout the cooperative principle. This study used qualitative descriptive analysis. The data was collected through document and used qualitative content analysis technique. From the twenty nine conversations, most characters did more maxim of relevance flouting and less maxim of manner flouting. Using Grice’s cooperative principle, the finding of this study indicated that each character had their reason for flouting. The characters flouted maxim of relevance because their utterance was not relevant with the previous utterance and in some instances they wanted to change the topic of conversation. They flouted maxim of manner because their utterance included more meaning, ambiguous meaning and sometimes not clear. They flouted maxim of quality because their utterance was not recognized the rightness, they used ironic statement. Lastly, they flouted maxim of quantity because they gave more information rather than required.