Grice's Cooperative Maxims in Waiting for Godot

It is assumed that participants of a conversation including speakers and listeners fundamentally attempt to communicate even if they are not aware of specific principles which may be considered essential for being cooperative. A prominent researcher, Paul Grice introduced cooperative principles including maxims of quality, quantity, relation and manner to consider how participants of a conversation obey or disobey the mentioned maxims in order to communicate their thoughts and ideas. This research was aimed at discovering the elements which lead to violation of Grice's maxims in an extraordinary drama named waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. In data analysis, several samples were collected and analyzed in order to find out that why cooperative principles are disobeyed. The result showed that on the one hand, the maxims were obeyed to cooperate properly and create communication amongst participants. On the other hand, participants often violated the maxims due to some factors which are major features of this play including ignorance, emptiness, hopelessness and lack of motivation. In fact, Beckett attempted to demonstrate how beliefs and thoughts can affect producing utterances in a way that they can violate rules of cooperation. Nevertheless, communication occurred via implication and inference by participants and they were able to interact and convey the meanings even if the rules were disobeyed.

Keywords:

Communication , Cooperative principles , maxims of Grice , Participants