Uncooperativeness in Political Discourse: Violating Gricean Maxims in Presidential Debate 2016

This paper analyses the different ways and forms by which politicians (during political debates) violate the Cooperative Principle (CP) in their communication. Applying Grice’s four maxims to the second 2016 US presidential debate, chosen to serve as objective material for this research, the study provides insight into the nature of how political discourse works nowadays, with issues of how politicians display uncooperativeness, in addition to being untruthful in their conversation by means of violating the conversational maxims. The transcription data was analysed within the features of conversation implicature. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches were adopted. The finding revealed that maxims in political debates can be violated in a number of ways, categorised as, opting out of a maxim, maxim of clash, flouting of maxims and violation of maxims. By breaking the maxims that generate conversational implicature, this study reveals that the politicians are being uncooperative. However, the obvious way in which the politician’s responses generate implicature is by flouting the maxims, especially that of quantity, quality and relevance whereas the maxim of manner was rarely found. This is why truthfulness, sufficiency or insufficiency of any piece of information cannot be readily understood because politics, most often, requires certain considerations in communicating any piece of information.