VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ********************* ĐINH THỊ PHƯỢNG AN ANALYSIS OF THE REALIZATION OF GRICE'S COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE IN PRESIDETIAL LIVE DEBATES BETWEEN DONALD TRUMP AND HILLARY CLINTON (Phân tích sự hiện thực hóa nguyên tắc cộng tác hội thoại của Grice trong các cuộc tranh luận trực tiếp giữa Donald Trump và Hillary Clinton) MASTER THESIS (Type 1) Field : English linguistics (applied programme) Code : 8220201.01 HANOI – 2019 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ********************* ĐINH THỊ PHƯỢNG AN ANALYSIS OF THE REALIZATION OF GRICE'S COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE IN PRESIDETIAL LIVE DEBATES BETWEEN DONALD TRUMP AND HILLARY CLINTON (Phân tích sự hiện thực hóa nguyên tắc cộng tác hội thoại của Grice trong các cuộc tranh luận trực tiếp giữa Donald Trump và Hillary Clinton) MASTER THESIS (Type 1) Field : English linguistics Code : 8220201.01 Supervisor : NGUYỄN THU HẠNH Ph.D HANOI – 2019 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com STATEMENT OF THESIS AUTHORSHIP I declare that the thesis I wrote entitled " An Analysis of the Realization of Grice's Cooperative Principle in Presidetial Live Debates Between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton" is truthfully my original work and did not incorporate to any material previously written or published by another author or writer except those indicated in quotations, paraphrasing method and bibliography. Due to this fact, I am the only person responsible for the thesis if there is any objection or claim from others. i LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I owe deep and sincere gratitude to my kind supervisor, Dr. Nguyen Thu Hanh.
I appreciate her constant encouragement, invaluable advice, and generous supervision which eventually help to improve the quality of this work. I am also grateful to all my friends who help during the preparation of this thesis. Without their motivation, help and kind support I would never have started my M. studies Finally, my words will never be sufficient to express my thanks to my family members, my parents, my husband, and my children for their financial, and moral support.
ii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ABSTRACT This study was aimed at identifying the non-observance of Grice's maxims and investigating the forces behind that breaching in the three American televised presidential debate in 2016 between Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, and Donald Trump, the nominee of the Republic Party. The data were collected from three downloaded videos of the presidential debates in 2016. Qualitative method was employed in processing the transcription of the data. The data were identified, classified, and then investigated based on Grice's Cooperative Principle proposed by Grice (1975).
The findings show that Clinton and Trump violated and flouted all the maxims in which they committed more violation than flouting and Trump failed to observe the maxims more often than Clinton. The most violated maxims were the maxim of quantity and relation while the most observed was maxim of manner. The study reveals that Trump and Clinton violated the maxims to deceive or mislead the listeners. They both employed this strategy to strengthen their image as well as weaken the opponent's preferability.
On the other side, they sometimes flouted the maxim of all kinds with the purpose of making their arguments more persuasive and convincing. In conclusion, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton repeatedly failed to observe Grice's conversational maxims in all the debates and they exploited this rhetoric to present themselves positively and other negatively to gain the listeners' approval. Key words: cooperative principle, conversational maxims, violating, flouting, persuading, deceiving. iii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF THESIS AUTHORSHIP.
iii LIST OF TABLES. vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION. Background of the Study. Rationale of the Study.
Research Scope and Limitation. Organization of the Thesis. 3 CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND .Concepts of Pragmatics. Pragmatics and Conversational Implicature.
Pragmatics and Cooperative Principle. The Cooperative Principles and Grice's Maxim. Maxim of Quantity. Maxim of Quality.
Maxim of Relevance:. Maxim of Manner. Non-Observance of Grice's Maxims. Maxim Opting out.
Language Power in Presidential Debates. Presidential Debates and Persuasive Function in the United States. Language Power in Presidential Debates. 16 iv LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY.
Data and Source of Data. Technique of Data Collection. Techniques of Data Analysis. 22 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION .Trump and Clinton's Violation of Grice's Maxims.
Violation of Quantity Maxim. Violation of Relevance Maxim. Violation of Quality Maxim. Violation of manner maxim.Flouting the Quantity Maxim.
Flouting the Quality Maxim. Flouting the Relation Maxi. Flouting the Manner Maxim. The Forces of the Non-observance of Grice's Maxims.
56 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS. I v LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Clinton and Trump's Frequencies of Grice's maxims Violation .24 Table 2: Example of Trump's violation of the relation maxim .32 Table 3: Clinton and Trump's Flouting Grice's Maxims .49 vi LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION In this chapter, the researcher briefly presents the background and rationale of the study. The research objective and research questions are also mentioned. Next, the researcher limits the research scope corresponding to its significance as well as presents the brief outline of the research.
Background of the Study In recent years, more and more studies have been conducted on pragmatics. Pragmatics is defined as the study of the context-dependent fields of meaning which are systematically abstracted away from the construction of logical form (Horn & Ward, 2004). Within the field of pragmatics, there are various aspects which are worth investigating. The cooperative principle is among the most interesting topics learned and analyzed.
The cooperative principle controls the way people interact one another effectively and sensitively. In other words, to get a satisfying conversation, the speaker is assumed to be cooperative by saying truthfully, informatively, relevantly and appropriately. There have been numerous pragmatics theories concerned the Cooperative Principle among which Grice's Theory of Conversational Implicature and Cooperative Principle has captured the attention and popularity the most. The Cooperative Principle and its four maxims are very essential contribution to pragmatics.
Grice asserts that in a conversation the interlocutors are supposed to follow the rules of specific maxims, namely quantity, relation, quality, and manner maxim, to speak cooperatively with one another. Grice also asserts that when interlocutors fail to follow the maxims in their exchange of talk, they break the cooperative principle for some purposes. This, according to Grice, can occur in four ways: violating, flouting, infringing, and opting -out a maxim. Apart from opting out and infringing a maxim, violation and flouting are divided into four types, corresponding to four kinds of maxims.
Among discourses analyzed on pragmatics, presidential debates are more and more chosen as materials of many linguistic studies because of its interesting richness in both politics and language. Presidential debates are considered an institutional component of the presidential campaign process. Compared to other campaigning genres, presidential debates give the electorates "a somehow less contrived 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com impression" (Benoit and Harthcock, 1999, p. American televised presidential debate is the most well-known political event.
It is the most followed, viewed, and intensively studied by numerous researchers in different aspects. In terms of linguistic study, American presidential debates have drawn a lot of attention from popular linguistic theorists. In a presidential debate, the candidates can realize their goals of gaining the voters' approval through different manipulations of which non-observance of Grice's maxims is quite useful because it helps them establish their preferability. In other words, non-observance of the conversational maxims can help the candidate to influence the audience's thinking and behavior respectively.
Rationale of the Study The 2016 presidential debates in the United States have drawn the attention not only from the Americans but from the audience all over the world because of it interesting features. The topic discussed in the debates are those of public interest. It is challenging for the candidates to give talk in the debates because they do not know the questions in advance. Therefore, their answers are more useful for the public to learn more about them.
Unlike previous presidential elections, this was the competition of a typical politician candidate and a typical businessman candidate. The suitability of this case for analysis resulted from the observation that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, whether consciously or unconsciously, failed to follow the Cooperative Principle many times. As can be seen, although there have been some studies on Cooperative Principle in political discourse, there is a lack of study on the realization of the conversational maxims and its functions in relation to candidates' purposes of persuasion. Besides, it was the first time in the American history of presidential election when a nominee was not a typical politician and the other was a woman, so the study will be in high demand and draw large interest.
Research Objectives This study mainly rely on pragmatics field, especially in conversational maxims. The cooperative conversational maxims by Grice (1975) is employed to analyze how the presidential nominees fail to follow the maxims in 2016 American televised presidential debates. The researcher sets the focuses on the non-observance of Grice's cooperative maxims because this can make the research analyzed more deeply and interestingly. The researcher wants to have deeper understanding of the 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com candidates' realization of the Cooperative Principle in their exchanges of talk, which is purposely directed by their personal goals in the debates.
Research Questions This research is conducted to answer the following questions: 1. How did the two candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump fail to observe Grice's cooperative maxims? 2. What can be the pragmatic functions behind the nominees' non-observance of Grice's maxims? 1. Research Scope and Limitation This study relies on pragmatics area especially in Conversational maxims.
The researcher uses Conversational maxim theory proposed by Grice to analyze hoe the interlocutors of the televised American 2016 presidential debates violated and flouted Grice's conversational maxims. The researcher focuses on the non-observance of Grice's conversational maxims in Trump and Clinton's answers in the three above- mentioned debates. Research Significance The findings of this study are supposed to give contributions theoretically and practically. Theoretically, this research is expected to broaden the researcher's and reader's knowledge in the pragmatics which is particularly related to the cooperative principle and maxim breaching.
This study is also expected to be useful in helping linguistics students to get more resources about cooperative principles or maxim non- observance as well as inspire other researchers to develop further researchers on the topic, especially topics of violating and flouting in political discourses. Organization of the Thesis The study was divided into five chapters. Following this brief introduction- Chapter 1, Chapter 2 discusses the Cooperative Principle by Grice and its maxims which are focused on the way they are observed or breached. Besides, the researcher also gives outline of common features of language use in political debates.
Chapter 3 presents the method used in the study, the data to be analyzed and its context. Chapter 4 is devoted to the analysis the candidates' non-observance of the maxims and find out its persuasion functions. It tries to answer the research questions that motivated this study. Chapter 5 presents conclusion of the study and its limitations as well as suggestions for future research avenues in the field of political discourse analysis.
3 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND In this chapter, the researcher presents the theoretical background of the study.