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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 mostly does have purposes. When people converse

to each other, their utterances including questions, statements, answers, responses, feedbacks,

suggestions, declines, and so on must have purposes and even sometimes have a way deeper and

richer meaning or contains various kinds of implicit meanings and intentions underneath that

might take a while for the hearers to finally discover or acknowledge.

As a matter of fact, language holds a huge role for human beings as the bridge that the

humans use to converse and connect to each with each other. Through conversations itself,

numerous things can be achieved. Humans can express and convey their ideas, emotions, desires,

feelings, thoughts, needs, and perhaps ask, suggest, or share information to create a social

relationship with another people. It becomes the main device to interact with the environment

and the society. 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.

Markee and Kesper (2004) as quoted by Khosravizadeh and Sadehvandi (2011:122)

stated that conversation, as a reciprocal act, in fact retains specific rules and regulations. During

a conversation, the cooperativeness between speakers or participants are crucial, required and

must be done by both participants in order to make conversation run as smooth as possible and

reach the main purpose of the communication itself. Yet most of the times, people are not

completely aware at the fact that their conversations don’t occur as smooth as it should be with
some flouting, clashing, violating rules of conversation here and there, the rules that most people

never knew existed. The idea of cooperativeness itself within a conversation was actually being

brought up by some well-known experts, but one of the most prominent cooperative principle

theory that still is widely used is known as Grice’s Maxims or also known as Cooperative

Principle, a theory that H.P. Grice invented in 1975, as it elaborated how important the

cooperativeness between speakers and hearers, along with a number of rules of a conversation

during a communication which is divided into four kind of Maxims, which concerns to Quantity,

Quality, Relevance, and Manner of the conversation. Grice (1975) also said that conversation is a

cooperative behavior, and therefore by proceeding by rules of cooperative conduct.

These maxims that Grice invented are some set of rules of the conversation which must

be obeyed by the communicator (both speakers and listeners) in doing interaction textually or

orally in order to have a communication process to be done smoothly and flawlessly. In a certain

case of a conversation, in fact, sometimes, the speakers intentionally refrain to apply a certain

rule in their conversation to cause misunderstanding on their participants’ part or to even achieve

some other various kind of purposes. It’s known under the term Violation. Violation in

conversation is not only found in daily basis when people interact, but violation in conversation

is also found in the movies that’s done by the characters, inside of novels, in the interviews, in a

debate, or other forms of social interactions.

Participants tend to violate the maxims within a conversation because of various kind of

reasons and various kind purposes, and those factors, which contains reasons and purposes are

diverse. The reasons and the purpose could be discovered by the contemplating and considering

the context of the situation in which the violation of the Maxims occurred. And as a matter of

fact, the result of the violation of these rules that’s done by one of the participants will perhaps
never be discovered by the hearer, as the speaker mostly only wants the hearer to get the implicit

meaning of their utterances, the main reason why they intentionally violate the maxim in the first

place.

Chirstoffersen (2005) said 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

maxims in order to cause some sort of certain misunderstandings on their participants’ part to

achieve some other specific purposes, for example to protract answer, to please counterpart, to

avoid discussion, to avoid unpleasant condition, and to express feelings.