Investigation on Violation and Flouting of the Maxims in Romeo and Juliet story

The focus of this study is to analyze the extent to which the maxims are either violated or flouted. philosopher Paul Grice has proposed co-operative principles and he suggested that the co-operative principles consist of four maxims1. parties of a conversation expected to follow these maxims but when speaker disobey them, it seems that, there is an implicate meaning behind them. Unlike the violation of maxims, which takes place to cause misunderstanding on the part of the listener, the flouting of maxims takes place when individuals deliberately cease to apply the maxims to persuade their listeners to infer the hidden meaning behind the utterances; that is, the speakers employ implicate (S. C. Levinson, 1983).This paper used “Grecian Maxims” as an analytic tool to find the implicate meaning behind the utterances of ten conversation sample from the “Romeo and Juliet” play of Shakespeare to clarify the concept of maxim flouting.

Keywords:

Maxims Violation , co-operative principles , maxim flouting