Pragmatics : grice's conversational maxims violations in the responses of some western politicians

Abstract EN

This paper accounts for the application of Grice's four maxims of conversational implicatures to some political interviews randomly chosen, to serve as objective material of this work.

The study is an attempt to find out how much the maxims of quantity, quality, relevance and manner are followed throughout the responses of the politicians con-cerned.

Cases of violation are given considerable importance in this paper especially the violation of the maxim of quality which is considered the core of truthfulness of any conversation.

The researchers have used statistics and, to some extent, percentages just to show to what extent the above maxims are violated, especially the maxim of quality.

The results have proved the correctness of the hypothesis of this work which states that when the maxim of quality is violated, all other maxims are difficult to adhere to.