Grice's Maxim Essay

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The Violation of Grice’s Maxims (1)The Violation of the Quantity Maxim The violation of the quantity maxim occurs when either giving less or more information than the speaker needed. The speaker purposely leaves the speech with less information, and the hearer has to wonder why the speaker is saying like this, and what the real meaning of the utterance is, thus can make some reaction of the conversation. For example: A: Where did you go? B: Out. Here B gives less information to A, violates the quantity maxim, from B's reaction we can see that he is reluctant to tell more details. The maxim requires people should be informative; tautology is a kind of violation of quantity maxim. (2)The Violation of the Quality Maxim The …show more content…

Methodology Design Introduction In this paper, quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are used as the research methods. Quantitative analysis is used to examine to what extent that verbal humor can be produced by violating Grice’s maxims in The Big Bang Theory. Qualitative analysis is used to analyze the examples that taken from The Big Bang Theory. So people can know how the verbal humor generated by the violation of cooperative principle in The Big Bang Theory Data Collection Now the Big Bang Theory has its tenth season. But this season has not finished yet. So we selected season 9 as our data. For quantitative analysis, we selected the first episode to analyze. The utterances spoken by the characters containing the types of violating of the Grice’s Cooperative Principle will be analyzed in this study. For qualitative analysis, a purposeful sampling was used to collect the data in the first five episodes in ninth season. Next, the scripts retrieved from the website‘http://www.tvsubtitles.net/tvshow-154-9.html/’ were cross-checked and compared with the actual

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