A Study of Violated Maxims Produced by the Main Character in Liar Liar Movie Subtitle

Abstract

This research deals with cooperative principles theory proposed by Grice (1975) as the main tool to analyze the ways lies are constructed through utterances. In addition, the theory of categories of acceptability of lies by Lindskold & Walters (1983) is used in this research to know the reasons of lying. The aims of this research are to find out the type of violated maxims produced by the main character in Liar Liar movie subtitles and the reasons why the main character told lies. This was a qualitative research. The data of this research were the main character’s utterances of Liar Liar movie subtitles which represent violating maxims and containing lies. The documentary method was used to collect the data. To collect the data, every main character utterance in the subtitle was identified to select the utterances which violating maxims when he told lies. The collected data were classified into two major group based on the number of maxims violation in an utterance. Then the selected utterances were identified to find out the types of violating maxims and the reasons of lying. The result of this study showed that there were four maxims which were violated by the main character in this movie. The four maxims are maxim of quality, maxim of quantity, maxim of relevance, and maxim of manner. There were five single violated maxim and fourteen multiple violated maxim. In this result, the dominant maxim violation is maxim of quality. It showed that all data which are categorized having maxim violation had maxim of quality violation. In addition, the result also revealed that there were some reasons that motivated the main character in telling a lie. Based on the theory, there are six categories of lying. However, this research only found five categories of lying. The dominant reason is telling a lie to save others from minor hurt, shame, or embarrassment