Conversational Implicature In “David Axelrod Interviews President Barack Obama”

Abstract

This research dealt with pragmatic study that aimed to know how non-observance maxim generated conversational implicature and to find out conversational implicature and also the function of conversational implicature itself in David Interviews President Barack Obama from the Axe Files. The researcher used the theory of Cooperative Principle proposed by Paul Grice and the theory of Brown and Levinson for this study. The data were collected by reading the interview transcript. Descriptive Qualitative method was applied to analyze the collected data. The result showed that there were nineteen conversational implicature found in the interview script based on Cooperative Principle Theory. The researcher found that most of the non-observance of maxim was maxim of quantity, because both interviewer and interviewees wanted his words were understood completely. Most of utterances were categorized as general conversational implicature, because this interview was known not too formal interview because it involved two friends, so that there were some jokes and implicature that reader could interpret without specific information. The most function of conversational implicature as found in the script was give information, it was dominated because in the interview both interviewer and interviewees gave information about the topic each other.