Flouting of Conversational Maxims in Comments on Social Media Instagram

Abstract

The name Instagram is short for the word "instant-telegram" hence when viewed from the combination of the two words "insta" and "gram", Instagram means the ease of taking and viewing photos that can be sent or shared with others, and the users of Instagram can comment in the photo that other users share. People in Instagram uses ambiguous, slang, or any other forms of language to comment in other users post for various reasons. During this comment process, they exchange meanings, which calls for both message senders and receivers to understand and interpret the messages in the same perspectives. In interpreting the meanings or messages people convey through a conversation, the intension of the utterances they make are aimed to socialize within the society well, but often people misunderstanding the meanings of utterances in comment section. Therefore this research was conducted with the objective to identify flouted maxims in comments on Instagram posts and to find out the implied meanings intended by speakers in conveying messages to the readers (hearers). The data were taken from the comments section on Instagram posts which indicate flouting maxims. And this research uses qualitative descriptive to describe and give an overview of the data found in this research using Pragmatic approach. Five data are discussed in this paper based on the conversation implicature and cooperative principle. The results show that the flouted maxims are those of Relation and of Manner. The analysis performed on the data has also shown that the reason behind the implied meanings intended by speakers are that the speakers want to show friendly impression and familiarity.

Keywords: Instagram, conversation implicature, cooperative principle, meanings, flouting maxims