A Study of The Flouting and Hedging Maxims on Politics Articles Found in The Jakarta Post

ABSTRACT

Communication needs cooperation between the speaker and the hearer. They share the same assumption and expectation about the topic and how to develop their communication. Cooperative Principle and its maxims studied in Discourse Analysis are often referred to as they provide a lucid description of how listeners and readers can distill information from an utterance even though that information has not been mentioned outright. Then, it can be concluded that conversation or communication can go on smoothly if the Cooperative Principle is used. However, not all communications, either verbal or non-verbal, use four maxims. It disobeys of Grice's maxims either one maxim or more. Related to those phenomena, the research problems are explored, namely “What are the maxims flouted and hedged by the writer of politics articles found in The Jakarta Post?" and "When the maxims are flouted and hedged by the writer of politics articles found in The Jakarta Post?".

This study uses a descriptive qualitative design since the data were descriptively analyzed based on the Grice’s theory of Cooperative Principle, especially how the maxims are flouted and hedged by the writer of politic articles in The Jakarta Post.

The finding of the study reveals that there are many kinds of flouting and hedging maxims found in the politic article of The Jakarta Post. The researcher finds that the highest number of the flouting maxims is overstatement, followed by metaphor, rhetorical question, and irony. Moreover for the hedging maxim, it has the higher number than rhetorical question and irony. From the study it is proved that the flouting and the hedging maxims of the Cooperative Principles as theorized by Grice do occur not only in conversational utterances but also in sentences in written discourse when the writers are delivering and maintaining their opinions.

From those findings, it is hoped that this study will be useful for the journalists to consider or comprehend the maxim particularly the flouting and hedging maxims when they write the article, especially on politic article. So, what they intend to convey will be easily understood by the readers.