An Analysis on Maxims of relevance used speeches by Hillary Clinton

ABSTRACT

Maxim of relevance studies the utterances in which the speaker means and the contribution must be relevant to the purpose of the conversation. Then, the principle of the relevance is communicative efficiency. It makes our contribution be the one with the maximum ratio of contextual implications to processing cost as possible. The main point is not waste a time, be polite, and must clear or not vague. In finding the maxim of relevance, there is conversational goal that includes social goal and personal goal. Social goal fulfill such as observing politeness strategy and personal goal depends on the speaker/addressor’s means, for example: finding box chocolate, etc.

Speech is the product of verbal expression. It’s also mean as way of speaking, or formal talk given to an audience. Speech physically can be many kinds, such as: preach, lecture, paper presentation, or inaugural speech. Gricean as the first community that considered the importance of speech, viewed speech as not only to deliver message, idea, desire, hope, and education from one person to another. According to the contents of speech, there are many utterances that can analyze as maxim of relevance based on Grice’s theory.

This research use descriptive qualitative method that emphasizes the specific cases. Therefore, the researcher is interested in observing her speeches in order to find out the maxim of relevance and the factors that influence maxim of relevance and descri be it. The researcher collected the data by observing the utterances in Hilary Clinton’s speeches in her campaign president election in 2008.

The result of this study show that Hillary’s speeches used maxim of relevance, the key of communication, and some politeness strategy, to find the goal of maxim of relevance. Then, the researcher also found one irrelevant utterances.

Finally, by analyzing utterances in Hillary’s speeches, the listener and the readers are
expected to understand the content of Hillary’s speeches. Moreover, this study can lead the next researcher to conduct the research on other English speeches in order to enrich the
understanding of maxim analysis.