Violation of Grice’s maxims and humorous implicatures in the Arabic comedy Madraset Al-Mushaghbeen

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the violation of Grice’s Maxims in the Arabic comedy Madraset Al-Mushaghbeen and explain how the violation of the maxims brings about humorous effects in the play. The analysis shows that 61 instances of maxims violation were identified in the play. Maxim of Manner receives the highest percentage of violation i.e., 24 (39.3%) compared to the other maxims. Maxims of Relevance and Quality come next, i.e., 14 (22.9%) and 13 (21.4%). Maxim of Quantity constitutes 10 number of violations (i.e., 21.4%). The study shows that most of maxim violations that create humorous situations are perceived through the following: rhetorical strategy of overstatement and personification, use of misleading conventional-coded expressions, incongruity of conversation-established concepts/ideas, and breaking of communication norms. The study also reveals that cultural and background knowledge significantly contribute to eliciting the humorous implicatures from the characters’ utterances. The study concluded with the following implications: humorous implicature depends on the conventions of the speakers’ community and the language shared among them; and it arises as a result of speakers’ acts and/or expressions that tend to be incongruous with the behavior and concepts established in the culture of the concerned interlocutors.

Keywords

• violation; Grice’s maxims; humorous implicatures; comedy; cooperative principle

References

1. Ahmed, Mazin. (2007). On the Relationship Between Grice's Maxims and Humorous Discourse. Journal of Adab AL-Rafidayn, vol. 45 (1): 49-66.
2. Al Kayed, M. (2019). An analysis of Jordanian Jokes: a Pragmatic Study of Humour. Global Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, vol.7 (1): 13-20.
3. Attardo, Salvatore (1994). Linguistic Theory of Humor. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
4. Benton, H. (ed.). (1983). The New Encyclopedia Britannica: Macropedia Knowledge in Depth Volume 9. Chicago: William Benton Pub.
5. Chen, R. (1993). Conversational implicature and poetic metaphor. Language and Literature. 18,53-74.
6. Grice, P. (1975). Logic and Conversation. In P. Cole & J.L. Morgan (Ed.), Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts (PP.41-58). New York: Academic Press.
7. Hassan, B. (2013). The Pragmatics of Humour: January 25th Revolution and Occupy Wall Street. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 4 (2) :23-39. http://dx.doi.org/10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n2p551
8. Hu, S. (2012). An Analysis of Humour in The Big Bang Theory from Pragmatic Perspectives. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, vol. 2 (6): 1185-1190. http://dx.doi:10.4304/tpls.2.6.1185-1190

9. Ibraheem, S and Abbas, N. (2016). A Pragmatic Study of Humor. Australian Advances in Language and Literary Studies, vol. 7(1): 80-87. http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.7n.1p.80
10. Jensen, Kim Ebensgaard. (2009). Humor, AAU, Almen Engelsk. Modern World Kim Ebensgaard Jensen.
11. Leech, G. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman Group Limited.
12. Schwarz, Jeannine. (2010). Linguistic Aspects of Verbal Humor in Stand-up Comedy. Dessertation. Saarbrücken: der Universität des Saarlandes.
13. Taberski, D. (1998). A Gricean analysis of a situation comedy. Theses Digitization Project 1439.
14. Thomas, J. (1995). Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics. Essex, England: Longman.
15. Yule, George. (1996). Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press.