Hedging and Flouting in the Script of High School Musical 2 Movie

ABSTRACT

In daily conversation, people share idea, thoughts, information and feeling through language. Both speaker and hearer should obey the rules that arrange how to communicate effectively. Practically, people will apply the cooperative principle that is reflected in the four maxims of conversation to achieve effective communication. They are quantity maxim, quality maxim, relevance maxim, and the manner maxim. In fact, people sometimes deliberately disobey the maxims by flouting them, but it does not lead into miscommunication. It gives rise to conversational implicature, instead. In addition, people usually hedge the maxim as one of politeness strategies and methods to observe the maxims. Therefore, this research observes what and why utterance are hedged and flouted in the script of High School Musical 2 Movie.

This research is aimed at finding out what and how conversational maxims are hedged and flouted in the script of “High School Musical 2” movie This research is descriptive qualitative. The researcher collected the data by watching the movie, downloading the transcript, confirming transcript by listening and reading it, highlighting the existence of the data on the transcript which are included hedging and flouting, arranging the data based on the sequence of appearing in the movie and the researcher identified the data based on Grice’s conversational maxim.

The findings show that the entire four maxims are flouted and hedged by the characters in the movie. The most frequently flouted maxim is quality maxim and the most frequently hedged maxim is also the maxim of quality. The findings illustrate that characters in the film flout the maxim of quantity by speaking something less or more than is expected, exaggerating their statement, and doing repetition on their remarks. In addition, the quality maxim is flouted when saying untrue things, distorting the information, saying something which they are lack of sufficient evidences, making irony or sarcastic statement and using metaphor concept when conversing. Further, the relevant maxim is flouted by changing the topic of the conversation aburptly, giving irrelevant remarks or avoiding talking about the topic being discussed and the manner maxim is flouted by making ambigious language, prolixity (a superfluousor redundant statement), exaggerating something, or does not speak succinctly, making obscurity of the statement and not completing the statement. On the other hand, the quantity maxim is hedged by giving information which is not as much as or not as precise as the information provided. The quality maxim then is hedged by quoting someone’s statement. In addition, it happens when the characters are not responsible completely to the truth of the statement and when the characters express the assertion by using the degree of possibility. Afterward, the relevant maxim is hedged by changing from the sensitive topic of conversation. The last, manner maxim is hedged by avoiding obscurity and unnecessary prolixity of the utterance.

The researcher also would like to suggest for the next researcher who want to conduct a study in the same field to use different theory in analyzing the data. The theory from Rachel Giora and Speber and Wilson maybe can help to study and solve deeper about flouting and hedging problems.