1Senior Lecturer, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, ITER, Siksha ‘O ’Anusandhan (Deemed to be University), Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India
2Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, ITER, Siksha ‘O ’Anusandhan (Deemed to be University), Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India, ashokmohanty@soa.ac.in
*Corresponding author email id: rabindrakar@soa.ac.in
Online published on 23 November, 2018.
People's linguistic behaviour can emanate variety of non-linguistic information about them. According to Bontly (2005, Philosophical Studies), implicatures provide adequate references about a person or an object. The present paper puts the pivotal focus on the verbal behaviour of the protagonist character, Mukund Sir in the backdrop of different speech situations in Manoj Das's short story ‘Prithviraj's Horse’. Conversations between Mukund Sir and other characters are studied in pragmatic perspective by analysing some important pragmatic concepts such as conversational maxims and implicature. Several speech situations in the story are found to be triggered with maxim violations and resultant implicatures. Attempt has been made to explain those implicatures, so as to reach the hidden meaning or indirect meaning of the speakers. Those hidden meanings are the clues to know more about the teacher character in the story. This paper adopts H.P. Grice's cooperative principle of conversation as the framework to explore the speakers’ adherence, flouting or violation of different conversational maxims.
Cooperative principle, Conversational maxims, Implicature, Flouting, Violation of maxims
