A study on implicatures of the editorials used in Media Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This study focused on analyzing the Editorials of Media Indonesia using Grice’s theory of implicature. Implicature is anything that is inferred from an utterance, but that is not a condition for the truth of the utterance, as a newspaper, Media Indonesia has functions as media of information, communication, advertisement, and social control. It is well-known as the reliable, objective mass media and has balancing news based on the ethics of journalism. In written text such as newspaper, the language used is often contextual and interpretable. Besides, it has implied and intended meaning, particularly on its editorials. Based on this background, the study about the implicatures of the editorials used in Media Indonesia was conducted with the following problems: (1) What are the implicatures used in the editorials of Media Indonesia? (2) How are the implicatures used in the editorials of Media Indonesia?

The data were selected from May 1, to May 10, 2003 which were published by Media Indonesia in the forms of sentences. This study was conducted using descriptive qualitative research based on Grice’s theory of implicature.

There are some findings covering the formulated questions. There are three implicatures used by the editorials of Media Indonesia: generalized implicature, particularized implicature and conventional implicature. First generalized implicature was used in the editorials when the cooperative principle tends to be obeyed by the writers) and since readers do not need to draw the context which bound it, the information being conveyed is brief, clear, in chronological order and no context is required by the readers to understand the information. Second, particularized implicature was used when the readers need certain context to understand the intended messages, the clarity and sufficiency of information was not given by the writers) to readers. Third, conventional implicature was used when the editorials are not derived from superordinate pragmatic principle like maxims, but are simply attached by convention to particular lexical item or expression.

Based on these findings, it is recommended to the editors to apply the implicature particularly the generalized implicature when they write editorials. So, the readers do not need to draw the context which bound it and they have no difficulty to understand the editorials for they are context-free and Grice’s maxims of ،،cooperative principle” namely; maxims of quantity, maxims of quality, maxims of relevance and maxims of manner are abided. Furthermore, it is suggested to choose the appropriate words, to be brief and be orderly in order to be able to represent the whole information and does not provide unneeded information to the reader. It is also recommended that the next researcher can use Grice’s theory of implicature to conduct the research on the other fields of study.