UNDERSTANDING CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE IN ‘BOL’: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

Sometimes, people say something while they mean another. It happens when people do not follow four maxims of communication, as introduced by H.P. Grice (1975) in his theory of Cooperative Principle. This non-observance of speakers leads to the possibility of suspending, opting out, infringing, violating and flouting of four proposed maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner. Therefore, the focal interest of this research is to analyse the selected dialogues produced in Pakistani Movie ‘Bol’ based on this non-observance of maxims. This study also investigates the types of conversational implicature in the utterances of the film and illustrates the role of conversational implicature in meaning-making process.  In conducting this research, the researcher uses a Pakistani social drama film ‘Bol’ as a data source and selects five dialogues to examine their intended meaning through non-random sampling. For this purpose, an analytical model devised by Mane (2012) based on Grice’s (1975) theory of implicature is used to describe and understand the implied meaning of the selected dialogues that is a result of non-observance of characters in communicating their ideas, moods and thoughts. The research concludes after analysing the dialogues that two types of conversational implicatures, those are generalized conversational implicature (GCI) and particularized conversational implicatures (PCI) are more evidently employed to gain the desired impacts implicitly. This research can be a significant addition in already available research on the usage of implicature in Pakistani contemporary films. This study ends up with the limitations and specific suggestion for more research in this area of sociolinguistics. In this way, the research is open to review many other films, dramas and other theatre work under the theoretical propositions of Grice in Pragmatics.