RHETORICAL STRATEGIS IN FLOUTING GRICE’S MAXIMS AS FOUND IN “PYGMALION”

Abstract

Ideally in a communication, the speaker should fulfill the requirements of the message being informative, clear, and relevant to achieve successful conversation. Moreover Grice identified the conversational cooperation into cooperative principles that cover four maxims: quantity, quality, relation, and manner. However, in a real conversation, there is a tendency that the speaker does not follow the cooperative principles. The reason is that the speaker has certain goals or certain reasons such as for the sake of politeness, time efficiency, persuasion, and the like. Borrowing Grice’s term, the speaker flouts Grice’s maxims. The maxims are flouted usually by means of indirect, and contradictory utterances, of figures of speech such as irony, metaphor, understatement or litotes, hyperbole or overstatement, rhetorical question, and tautology. These kinds of communication strategy are called rhetorical strategies.This paper would like to highlight the work of rhetorical strategies in flouting conversational maxims in Pygmalion