REVEALING THE IMPLIED MEANINGS OF THE CHARACTERS’ UTTERANCES IN MEG CABOT’S VALENTINE PRINCESS

Abstract

The object of this thesis is a young-adult genre novella written by an American author Meggin Patricia Cabot, or well-known as Meg Cabot, entitled Valentine Princess. This novella tells about a young princess Mia in facing her first Valentine’s Day with her first boyfriend at that time, Michael Moscovitz. Judging from the genre of the novella itself, it can be concluded that there will be a lot of communication among the characters, mainly young people with their tendency to make snarky comments. In the field of social life, people do not always utter the utterances straightforwardly and honestly toward their opponent, they often modify their words in order to get what they want or get their point crossed without having to explain clearly to the other communicators. That is called implicature. This study is meant to reveal the characters’ implied meanings. In order to solve the problems created by implicature, such as misunderstanding in communication, misleading, ambiguity, and so on, there is a tool called cooperative principles as the basic thought of the creation of four maxims proposed by Grice. Unfortunately, the four maxims which are supposed to be the “rules” to make communication good are often disobeyed by the communicators in the field of social life. Therefore, Grice also proposed the opposite of four maxims called non-observance of maxims which consists of five parts: flouting maxim, suspending maxim, violating maxim, infringing maxim, and opting out maxim. Flouting maxim would be the main tool in this study. Using Grice’s flouting maxim the writer tries to uncover the implied meanings of characters’ utterances. The data collecting is held by using sampling method in order to get the suitable utterances of flouting maxim. There are total 244 utterances uttered by the characters. After being examined using Grice’s flouting maxim, only 27 of them are considered flout the maxims. The result tells that all four maxims are flouted in this novella. They flout the maxim of quality by stating something untrue, maxim of quantity by giving information more than is required, maxim of relevance by giving irrelevant comebacks, and maxim of manner by giving unclear answers. The characters flout the maxim for many reasons, mostly because they are not comfortable to directly say what they really mean and they mean to express sarcasms.