AN ANALYSIS ON CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE OF THE VERBAL HUMOUR OF THE SELECTED MIMI AND EUNICE COMIC STRIPS

Abstract

People communicate each other in daily activities in different ways. Some of them literally say what they want to say, but others indirectly say their intended meaning by using implicature in their conversation. Implicature is used by people to indicate that they have an implied meaning the others should understand and the use of implicature leads them to flout the maxim of Cooperative Principle. Understanding implicature is important to minimize misunderstanding between two participants in a conversation and the possibility of making wrong inference by the addressee. The object of this study is Mimi and Eunice comic strips since it presents language phenomena where implicature is used by the characters in the comic strips. Therefore, this research is held to find out the implied meaning of the characters by analysing the utterances that flout the maxims of Cooperative Principle in accordance with the context of situation in the comic strips. This study employs qualitative and quantitative research. Qualitative method is applied to describe the data in the form of utterances in the dialogue sand quantitative one is used to shows the statistical calculation on the number of each kind of flouting of maxims found in the Mimi and Eunice comic strips. Based on the result of the flouting maxims analysis, there are 22 utterances that flout single maxim and 1 utterance that flouts double maxims. There are 11 utterances flout the maxim of Quality, 2 utterances flouts the maxim of Quality, 4 utterances flout the maxim of Relevance and 7 utterances flout the maxim of viii Manner.The result shows that the characters use implicature to indicate that they have implied meanings. The use of implicature makes them flout the maxims of Cooperative principle. The flouting of the maxims of Cooperative Principle may cause misunderstanding and wrong inference that the addressee probably made if the addressee do not understand the implied meaning of the speaker.