Analysis of Conversational Implicatures in Camus' The Misunderstanding: A Pragmatic Exploration

Abstract

Implicatures perform an important role in creating humour or imparting different shades of meaning to a message. Similarly, flouting has become one of the common features in our daily communication. The focus of this paper is to study the cooperative principles in Camus' French play, The Misunderstanding (1943). This is a qualitative research. For this purpose, the data has been collected through the purposive sampling technique. In this study, the framework of Grice (1975) has been adopted, in which he described four maxims that should be obeyed by a speaker while making a conversation. The present study explores that in what ways the Gricean maxims have been flouted by the characters of the play. Findings reveal that there are 24 implicatures found in 16 utterances. Out of these 24 implicatures, the maxim of quantity has been flouted more than the others as it appears with the ratio of 9/24. Then comes the maxim of manner with the ratio of 8/24. The maxim of a relation comes on the third rank with the ratio of 6/24 and in the last comes the maxim of quality with the lowest ratio of 1/24. This study can be further expanded to find out the scalar implicatures and speech acts in the selected play.