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Analysis of Flouting Grice’s Conversational Maxims by Syed Saddiq in a Podcast Interview

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Grice's Cooperative Principle emphasises cooperation, understanding, and conversational standards. However, political discourse is known for its persuasion and strategic communication, making it an interesting domain to study the Cooperative Principle and political speeches. This study explored how a Malaysian politician flouted Grice's Maxims in political discourse, using Grice's Cooperative Principle Theory as the theoretical framework. This study aimed to identify the flouted maxims and investigate the strategies employed by the selected politician. To do this, a 37-minute online podcast interview featuring Syed Saddiq was transcribed, and the content analysis method was used to analyse the transcribed data based on the theory of Grice's Cooperative Principle. The analysis revealed that the interview exhibited a total of twelve occurrences of flouting maxims. All four maxims, about number, quality, manner, and relationship, were flouted by Syed Saddiq, with quantity being flouted the most often. Also, Syed Saddiq adopted eight strategies to violate the maxims, including overstatement, understatement, lack of evidence, indirect responses, irrelevant answers, subject-changing, complex, confused, and ambiguous comments. By using Grice's Cooperative Principle Theory, this study provides valuable insights for scholars in pragmatics and society to understand political language and its impact on public opinion and discourse in Malaysia.
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