The analysis of flouting maxim in Good Morning America (GMA) talkshow

Englisia: Journal of Language, Education, and Humanities May 2020. Vol. 7, No. 2, 132-142 The analysis of flouting maxim in Good Morning America (GMA) talkshow Rofa Marlisa Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, Indonesia Didin Nuruddin Hidayat* Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, Indonesia Manuscript received March 24, 2020 revised April 15, 2020, first published May 18, 2020, and available online May 21, 2020. DOI: 10.22373/ej.v7i2.6630 Recommended APA Citation Marlisa, R., & Hidayat, D. N. (2020). The analysis of flouting maxim in Good Morning America (GMA) talkshow. Englisia: Journal of Language, Education, and Humanities, 7(2), 132-142. https://doi.org/10.22373/ej.v7i2.6630 ABSTRACT The present study is an analysis of the flouting maxim in Good Morning America (GMA) talk show in which Jackie Chan was invited as the guest star. The goals of this research are to find out the performed flouted maxim(s) by the hosts and the guest and to reveal the reason(s) behind the occurrence of the maxim(s). In this study, the researchers employed the qualitative method and data were collected from a video. The transcript text of the utterances between the hosts and Jackie Chan as a guest consisting of flouting maxim was the instrument of this research. Then, to find and analyze the flouting maxim showed in the video, the researchers used Grice’s theory, the Cooperative Principles consisting of four maxim types: quality, quantity, relation, and manner. The result showed that all four types of maxim flouting were committed by both Jackie Chan and the two hosts of the GMA talk show. The highest flouting maxims found were flouting the maxim of quantity and manner. Further, the study also revealed the rationales behind maxims flouting which were beneficial to build fun communication and to elaborate more explanations. Keywords: Cooperative principles; Flouting maxim; Good Morning America (GMA) talkshow * Corresponding author Rofa Marlisa & Didin Nuruddin Hidayat 1. Introduction Language can be used in many forms of people’s life, such as in written or spoken forms. According to Ekah and Akpan (2018), language is an essential tool for both written and spoken communication. As human beings, people usually use the spoken form when they want to interact directly with other people to build good communication. However, building good communication is not easy; it needs an equivalent understanding and a higher comprehension of the information given by the speaker or the listener. If the speaker and listener do not have a good comprehension of the information, it will undeniably cause a communication breakdown. Therefore, to avoid the occurrence of communication breakdown, we could apply the cooperative principles introduced by Grice (1975) which was further developed by other prominent linguists (e.g. Leech, 1983; Levinson, 1983; Thomas, 1995; Yule, 1996; Vergis, 2017). To elaborate his principle, Grice provided four maxims which should not be violated to generate good communication. The first maxim is the maxim of a quantity which primarily deals with how much information we should provide in a conversation. Grice (as cited in Yule, 1996, p. 37) elaborates two points as follows: a) make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange), and; b) do not make your contribution more informative than is required. The second maxim is the maxim of quality, which was further elaborated that we “do not say what you[we] believe to be false and do not say that for which you[we] lack adequate evidence” (Thomas, 1995, p. 63). The third maxim is the maxim of relation which deals with whether the contents are relevant; Yule (1996) further renamed this maxim to be the maxim of relevance. The last maxim is the maxim of manner which deals with the delivery of information. Grice (as cited in Thomas, 1995) elaborated the guidelines that to have good communication, people need to: “a) avoid obscurity of expression; b) avoid ambiguity; c) be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity), and; d) be orderly (p. 64)”. The rules of cooperative principles usually describe the basic principles of people interacting with others to reach mutual communication. However, as human beings, people will make some misunderstandings during communication due to some factors, such as different cultures, languages, perspectives, and so forth. Flouting is a condition when speakers are unable to apply certain maxims in their conversation and lead to misunderstanding in their conversation (Sembiring & Ghozali, 2017). Thomas (1995) stated that the most important category of failing to observe a maxim is flouting. Flouting the maxim is one of the ways in observing the failure of the maxim. The flouting of the maxim covers the real meanings of the speech and it arranges the listener in finding the implied meaning from the maxim flouting (Lestari, 2019). However, usually, most people did the flouting maxim to make their speaking partners find and understand the hidden meaning of their speaking. In this modern era, we can find many flouting maxims occurred, such as in TV talk show, interview, movie script (Ayasreh & Razali, 2018; Maqsood, Waqar, & Khalil, 2018; Nuringtyas, 2018). |Englisia: Journal of Language, Education, and Humanities | Vol.7, No.2, May 2020 | 133 The analysis of flouting maxim in Good Morning America (GMA) talkshow Referring to the explanations above, the researchers were interested in carrying out a research study related to flouting maxim based on the video of America’s good morning talk show with Jackie Chan as a guest star. Jackie Chan is a popular artist who is a non-native speaker of English with a strong accent of Mandarin. Jackie Chan was an old actor who is still popular until now because of his talent in mastering Kungfu. One of the reasons why people love to watch his movie is because he performed all his actions by himself or in other words, he does not use any stuntman to change him in every action. During the talk show, he answered all the questions with long answers, unimportant explanation, and a lot of various ambiguous words. In that video, two foreign hosts, a female, and a male spoke English very fluently while interviewing him. These situations, of course, will cause some problems in the communication process during the talk show such as flouting maxim. Due to this problem, the researchers formulate two main research questions to seek potential answers about the flouting maxim showed in the talk show: (1) What types of the maxim are flouted during the GMA talk show?; (2) What are the reasons for flouting maxim performance by the hosts and Jackie Chan in the GMA talk show? 2. Literature review Building successfully delivered information during the process of interaction is not easy; the speaker and listener will face some mistakes or misunderstandings. The mistakes usually occur in speaking are known as the flouting maxim a (...truncated)