Specifying the Violation of Conversational Maxims Used by the Characters in Youssef El Guindi's Play "Back of the Throat"

<p>According to Grice, conversational maxims are the fundamental rules that regulate<br>interpersonal communication. These rules state that for such communication to be<br>effective, it should be (a) genuine, (b) as informative as is necessary, (c) pertinent<br>to the discussion at hand, and (d) clear, organized, and concise. In most cases,<br>violations of these maxims are assumed to be intentional in attaining a specific<br>goal. This research seeks to find and clarify the types of cooperative principles<br>violated in the Back of the Throat play. In addition, it aims to discover the most<br>violated principles in the dialogue and the reasons that lead the characters in the<br>play to violate them. This study also attempts to explore the message that the<br>writer wants to convey by violating principles. The descriptive qualitative method<br>was used in this study. The source data for this study is the violation-filled<br>utterances of the characters in the Back of the Throat play. Maxim violations are<br>used to examine the data. The results of this study demonstrate that the characters<br>break all four types of maxims; nevertheless, the maxim of quality obtains the<br>highest percentage of violations, 22 (39.29 percent), compared to the other<br>maxims. Following that are the maxims of quantity and manner, which are 20<br>(35.71%) and 9 (16.07%), respectively. The maxim of relation is also violated 5<br>(8.93 %) times. </p>