Conversational Implicatures in the Political Talk of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah

Abstract

The aim of this research study is to examine the use of conversational implicature (Grice, 1975) in the political talk of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah to discover the types and functions of these implicatures. The study is based on pragmatic theories namely, „Cooperative principles and implicature‟. The current analysis follows pragmatic concepts which deal with meaning of utterances made by the speaker and interpreted by the listener. Politicians do not usually obey the maxims of conversation blatantly and flout them to give rise to an implicature that achieve a certain communicative effect (Chilton, 2004). The data collected for this study were selected from an interview that was broadcast live on AlMayadin TV channel on May 2019 in a talk show presented by the journalist Ghassan ben Jiddo. The findings revealed that the application of conversational implicatures tended to provide enormous benefits on the level of reassuring the supporters and intimidating the enemy. The application of Conversational Implicatures performed various functions which eventually made the talk more effective and persuasive. This type of research is descriptive qualitative because it does not need to focus on number and statistics, rather it deals with words and sentences and analyzes data obtained from reading the selected parts from the political interview.