1.

1 Background of The Study

A communication is the key of a social interaction between two participants or more.

Within a communication, a conversation is most likely to occur when human beings communicate
to each other and it is undeniably the most salient part when the word communication is mentioned.
A conversation usually does have purposes. When people converse to each other, their utterances
including questions, answers, responses, feedbacks, suggestions, declines, and so on must have
purposes and even sometimes have a way deeper meaning or contains various kinds of implicit
meaning and intentions underneath that might take a while for the hearers to discover or
acknowledge.

As a matter of fact, language plays a huge role for human beings as the bridge that the
humans use to converse with each other. Through language, humans can express their ideas,
emotions, desires, feelings, thoughts and transfer information to establish a social relationship with
another people. Conversation becomes the main tool to interact with the environment. In a
conversation, a speaker and a hearer are expected to respond to each other in their turn with the
needed information and responses that bring benefits to both participants or at least, one of them.

The conversation, itself, as a reciprocal act, in fact, retains specific rules and regulations.
The cooperativeness between speakers or participants must be done by both participants in order
to make conversation run as smooth as possible. The cooperative principle is also known as Grice’s
Maxims, as the maxims are divided into four kinds of maxims.

Inside a conversation, context of situation has become an important role in delivering the
conversation meaning, because context makes a difference in both the way the participants of the
conversation engage with each other and the way they interpret other people or the speaker’s
utterances. The maxims are the rules of the conversation which must be obeyed by the
communicator (speakers and listeners) in doing interaction textually or personally in order to have
communication process to be done smoothly. Yet, there are still so many people that violate four
of these maxims when communicating with each other that makes the conversations don’t seem as
smooth as it should be. Thus, violation of maxim is an interesting phenomenon because most
speakers don’t realize they violate the maxim of conversations even though they do purposely
violate the maxim.
 In a certain case of a conversation, sometimes, the speakers intentionally refrain to apply
certain maxims in their conversation to cause misunderstanding on their participants’ part or to
achieve some other purposes. It’s called Violation of a maxim. Violation in conversation it is not
only found in daily life, but violation in conversation is also found in script of conversation in the
movie or inside of a novel. Participants tend to violate the maxims within a conversation because
of various kind of reasons and various kind of situation which the occurrence of the violation of
the maxim, and those factors are interesting to be broke down and looked further as it’s going to
prove how the context of situation actually affects the violation of maxims, and analyze the reasons
behind the occurrence of violation of the maxim using the cooperative principle theories that H.P.
Grice invented. The Cooperative Principle or the Conversational Maxim is describing and
explaining the specific rational principles observed by people who obey the cooperative principle;
these principles enable effective communication. H.P. Grice stated that each speaker or participant
of a conversation must obey the four conversational maxims, such as Maxim of Quantity, Maxim
of Quality, Maxim of Relevant, and Maxim of Manner.

By applying cooperative principles, the speaker allows the hearer to draw assumptions
about the speaker’s intentions. Nevertheless, people cannot fulfill those maxims and they seem to
disobey them. Chirstoffersen (2005) says that in real life situation, people violate the maxims for
different reasons such as hiding the truth, saving face, cheering the hearer, and building someone’s
belief. Khosarvizadeh and Sadehvandi (2011:122-123) said that the speakers violate Grice’s
maxims in order to cause misunderstandings on their participants’ part to achieve some other
purposes, for example to protract answer, to please counterpart, to avoid discussion, to avoid
unpleasant condition, and to express feelings.