AN ANALYSIS OF JORDANIAN JOKES: A PRAGMATIC STUDY OF HUMOUR
The present study is a pragmatic analysis of Jordanian jokes within the framework of Grice's conversational implicature. The study aims at identifying the violation of Grice's Maxims that occur in Jordanian jokes, knowing the implied meaning of the violated Gricean Maxims in these jokes, and recognising the factors that influence the interpretation of these jokes. The sample of the study consists of 6 jokes elicited from WhatsApp and Facebook. The researcher categorised the data based on their type of violation by applying Grice's theory. Then, he analysed the implied meaning by using the theory of conversational implicature which was proposed by Grice. The findings of the study revealed that Jordanians violate the maxims to create laughter and to communicate social and economic meanings. Jordanians use humour created by the violation of the maxims to soften criticism or satire. In addition, the study showed that cultural and background knowledge plays a significant role in interpreting these jokes. KEYWORD: humour, jokes, implicature, pragmatics, Grice's maxims INTRODUCTION The current study is based on conversational implicature proposed by Grice (1975) Grice approaches conversational implicature by referring to the Cooperative Principle and its maxims. Grice suggests that people cooperate with each other in order to interpret language in interaction. So, he proposes the Cooperative Principle (CP) which states that "Make your contribution such as required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged" (Grice 1975, 45) Grice also structures CP by proposing four maxims. The first one is quantity maxim. According to this maxim, the speaker must make his/her contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange and does not make his/her contribution more informative than required. The second maxim is quality maxim which suggests that a speaker should not say what he or she believes to be false or say anything that lacks adequate evidence. The third maxim is relation which states that the hearer's response should be relevant to the speaker's speech. The last maxim is the manner maxim which suggests that a speaker should avoid obscurity of expression and ambiguity and should be brief and orderly. Grice (1975) suggested that when the interlocutors in a given conversation do not follow a maxim with an intention to communicate extra or implied meaning, a conversational implicature was created. The users of language may violate any maxim to create implied meaning. Violation of quantity maxim, for instance, happens when participants in conversations provide more or less information than is required. Consider the following example: 8 Boss: Did you clean the table and wash the dishes? Waiter: I cleaned the table. Global Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Vol.7, No. 2, pp.13 20, February 2019 ___Published by European Centre for Research Training and Development UK (www.eajournals.org) 14 Print ISSN: 2052 6350(Print) Online ISSN: 2052 6369(Online) The waiter in the previous example violates the maxim of quantity since he provides less information than required. The implied meaning suggests that the waiter did not wash the dishes. Research Purpose: The aims of this study are to identify the violation of the Gricean Maxims that occur in Jordanian jokes, to know the implied meaning of the violated Gricean Maxims in these jokes, and to identify the factors that may influence the interpretation of jokes (cultural and background knowledge)