CHAPTER 2

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

This chapter provides an overview of related theories which are presented into two

parts. The first part presents the pragmatics theory including the Grice’s cooperative principle

and the flouting maxims. And the second part presents the literature of film including the

character which is one of the elements of film or fiction.

2.1 Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the study of the meaning of the way humans use their language in

communication that is determined by the conditions of society (Mey, 2005:6).

According to Levinson (1983), Thomas (1995), and Yule (1996), Pragmatics is a

branch of linguistics that is concerned with the communicative functions of language.

Pragmatics focuses more on how we achieve meaning in particular context, by taking into

account thing like how, where and when something is said, who says it, what the relationship

is between the speaker and hearer, and how we make sense of ambiguous uses of language

(Baker and Ellece, 2011:100).

Wilson (1986) noted that there are three approaches, broadly speaking. The first,

Pragmatics could be seen as a part of philosophy. It is an attempt to answer certain questions

about meaning, in particular the relation between what sentences mean and what speakers

mean when they utter them. The second, Pragmatics belongs to linguistics. It could be seen as

an extension of the study of grammar in order to take into account and codify some of the

interactions between sentence meaning and context. And the third, Pragmatics is a part of

cognitive science. It could be pursued as an attempt at psychologically realistic account of

human communication (Allott, 2010:1).

Pragmatics consists of five aspects including deixis, conversational implicature,

presupposition, speech acts, and cooperative principle. However, this paper concerns only in

cooperative principle by Gricean theory.

2.1.1 Cooperative Principle

H. Paul Grice, the British philosopher, undertook an investigation of how the way

people behave in conversation, in the 1960s. In order to have a coherent conversation, he

assumed that all of conversationalist must accept and understand the meaning of the

conversation that is intended necessarily. The first and most general assumption is the

Cooperative Principle, as he stated,

“Make your contribution such is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of the talk exchange in which you are engaged” (Grice, 1975:47).

Cooperation here does not necessarily mean expression of agreement, but it does

mean that one is willing to contribute something in line with the purpose of the conversation

(Littlejohn and Foss, 2007:165).

And essentially, this principle holds people in conversation normally cooperate each

other, when you say something and people respond it, you assume that the response is

intended as a maximally cooperative one, and you interpret it accordingly (Trask, 2007:57-

58).

People in most situations make efforts to understand their utterances, and be able to

cooperate properly in conversation. The reason is that, without cause to expect otherwise,

interlocutors normally trust that they and their conversational partners are accepting the same

interpretive conventions (Finegan, 2007:287).

Furthermore, Grice elaborated his principle into four pragmatics sub-principles or

‘maxims’, as follows:

The maxim of quantity:

1. Make your contribution as informative as required;2. Do not make your contribution more informative than required.

The maxim of quality:1. Do not say what you believe to be false;2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

The maxim of relation:Make your contribution relevant.The maxim of manner:Be perspicuous, and specifically:

1. Avoid obscurity2. Avoid ambiguity3. Be brief4. Be orderly.(Mey, 2005:72)

2.1.2 The Flouting Maxims

Thomas stated that when people “blatantly fail to observe one or several maxims”, we

speak of ‘flouting’ a maxim, either semantically or pragmatically (Mey, 2005: 77).

In normal conversation, we will obey the rules of the cooperative principle. But

frequently, people do not follow purposefully and blatantly violate a maxim. This is because

people want to convey an implicit message of their utterances, but it still rests on the

principle of cooperative.

This is the argument of Grice about flouting maxims,

“He wants to explain how we can get others to understand the things that we mean but do not say outright, and he needs the maxims and their foundation of rational and cooperative conversation to build a convincing explanation” (Robinson, 2006:166).

According to Rahmani (2008) in his thesis titled “The Flouting and Hedging Maxims

Used by the Main Characters in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Movie”, the flouting of each maxim is

determined on the basis of the following criteria:

1. A speaker flouts the maxim of quantity when his contribution is not informative as is

required for the current purpose of the exchange and more informative than is required.

2. A speaker flouts the maxim of quality when his contribution is not true and he says

something for which lacks adequate evidence.

3. A speaker flouts the maxim of relation if his contribution is not relevant.

4. A speaker flouts the maxim of manner if contribution is not perspicuous it may be

obscure, ambiguous and disorderly.

For the examples of flouting the maxims are taken from “Analysis on Flouting

Maxims Found in Kung Fu Panda Movie Script Written by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn

Berger” (2011) by Yuanita Damayanti.

The flouting of the maxim of quantity could be seen in the scene when Po asked his

father, Mr. Ping, about the sign of the noodle dream.

Po : Uh, a sign of what?

Mr. Ping : You are almost ready to be entrusted with the secret ingredient of my

secret ingredient soup. And then you will fulfill your destiny and take

over the restaurant just as I took it over from my father who took it

over from his father who won it from a friend in a game of mahjong.

Here, Mr. Ping flouts the maxim of quantity, because he gave much more information

than Po needed. This is because he wanted to convince his son about his destiny to run the

restaurant with him as a heredity tradition.

For the flouting of the maxim of quality, it could be seen in the scene when Mr. Ping

asked Po about what he was doing upstairs with all of that noise.

Mr. Ping : What were you doing up there? All that noise.

Po : Oh, nothing. Just had a crazy dream.

Here, Po answered that he just had a crazy dream, which there was no adequate

evidence to explain that a dream can have noise, because he did not want to make his father

got angry.

The flouting of the maxim of relation could be seen in the scene when Master Shifu

asked Po to hit the dummy.

Master Shifu : Hit it.

Po : Ok. I mean, I just ate. So I’m still disgusting… so my kung fu might

not be as good as later on.

Here, Po answered by saying something that is not relevant to what Master Shifu

expected, because he did not want to practice Kung Fu.

And the flouting of the maxim of manner could be seen in the scene when Po asked

Master Shifu about how to get to the dragon scroll.

Po : Whoa. So how does this work? You have a ladder or trampoline

or…?

Master Shifu : You think it’s that easy? That I am just going to hand you the secret

to limitless power?

Here, Master Shifu answered by being unhelpful, because he did not want to give the

dragon scroll to Po.

According to Dornerus (2005) in her journal titled “Breaking Maxims in

Conversation: a Comparative Study of How Scriptwriters Break Maxims in Desperate

Housewives and That 70’s Show”, people frequently flout the maxims in order to achieve

certain purposes and have two reasons why they flout the maxims.

First, the reason is verbal humor. People use the flouting maxims to create and

develop humorous and dramatic situations in verbal interaction. And this is usually happened

when the interlocutors want to respond their conversational partner by giving information that

is not serious with a few jokes or even too seriously with exaggerated circumstances. They

use irony, metaphor, sarcasm, tautology, or transparent questions to respond it.

And the second reason is social status of individuals. People use the flouting maxims

to bring out different characteristics and personality traits in the different characters. And this

is usually happened when the interlocutors want to respond their conversational partner by

showing their characteristics and personality, such as they behave talkatively, over actively,

untruly, or mysteriously. And these characteristics and personality could be caused by

background and social class of that person.

2.2 The Literature of Film

A film is also called a movie or motion picture. It is a text just as a play, a poem, or a

novel (Caldwell, 2011:1).

Films are designed to have effects on viewers, that aimed to give viewers experiences

that they could not get from other media telling fictional stories, recording actual events,

animating objects or pictures, and experimenting with pure form (Bordwell & Thompson,

2008:28).

Film has a genre. Genre is a specific group of film which is defined by the set of

narrative and stylistic ‘rules’ the filmmaker adhere to, and it is to deliver a certain ‘type’ of

film which viewers are familiar (Caldwell, 2011).

The main genres are action, adventure, comedy, crime and gangster, drama, epics or

historical, horror, musicals or dance, science fiction, war, and westerns.

According to Benshoff and Griffin (2011), there are five main aspects of film:

1. Literary design. It refers to the elements of a film that come from the script and story

ideas, includes plot, characters, dialogue, setting, themes, point of view, recurring images,

and symbols.

2. Visual design or mise-en-scène. It refers to the choice of sets, costumes, makeup, lighting,

color, actors’ performance and the arrangement before the camera.

3. The cinematographic design. It includes things like the choice of framing, lenses, camera

angle, and camera movement.

4. Editing or montage. It refers to how all the individual shots the camera records are put

together in order to create meaning or tell a story.

5. Sound design. It refers to how the dialogue of the some characters could be easy to hear

and how to choose what type of music or soundtrack to play under a scene will greatly

affect viewer comprehension by directing the viewer toward the preferred understanding

of the images.

1.2.1 Character

Character is a person who is responsible for the thoughts and actions within a poem, a

prose, a drama, a film, or other literature that is extremely important because it is the medium

through which a reader or viewer interacts with a piece of literature. Every character has his

or her own personality to assist in forming the plot of a story or creating a mood. And the

other major elements in a literary work, such as theme, setting, and tone, could greatly

influenced by the different attitudes, mannerisms, and even appearances of characters.

(http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/allam/general/glossary.htm)

According to Guynn (2010), there are several techniques the story teller uses to

describe the fictional characters:

1. The author describes the characters from the physiological information, that makes the

readers or viewers could judge about the characters personalities, such as by their

individuated faces and bodies, their tone of voice, their gaits and postures, their costumes,

their age and sex, and so forth.

2. The author places characters in setting that ‘speak’ about their inner being. And it could

be said by the objects surround them.

3. The author defines characters through the decisions they make and the actions they take.

It makes the readers or viewers could understand characters through their behavior.

4. Characters define themselves in relationship to other characters. It is by contrast that is

one character serves as a foil to another, by similarity that is as a basis for comparing the

behavior of two characters, and by opposition that is as in the melodramatic figures of

hero and villain.

Sometimes the characters are not human. They might be animals, robots, or aliens.

However, they have human abilities and human psychological traits. For example is in ‘Cats

and Dogs’ (2001) movie that uses cats and dogs as the characters in the movie. In ‘Artificial

Intelligent: A.I’ (2001) movie uses robots as the characters in the movie, especially David

that is as the main character. And in ‘District 9’ (2009) movie uses the aliens as the characters

in the movie.

Every action of characters should have their motivation. The motivation is the

character’s drive toward a goal, the character’s psychological needs or impulses, or the

character’s need to deal with emerging circumstances.

And every story, even in film, drama or novel, has the main characters who would be

the most important people to lead the way of story tells about. In general, the readers or

viewers focus only in a protagonist and antagonist character of the story.

The protagonist is a word that comes from the Greek words for ‘first’ (protos) and

‘struggles’ (agonistes), that it could means that the protagonist as the main struggler in the

story. It is often called as a ‘hero’ of the story because it has characteristics as a morally good

person, forthrightness, self-assurance, devotion, and often balances strengths with

weaknesses that emphasize the character’s humanness. However, heroes do not always act

heroically. Sometimes the protagonist could also be an ‘anti-hero’, person who has a bad

personality. The example is Hannibal Lecter in ‘Hannibal Rising’ (2007) movie, as the boy

plans revenge on the barbarians responsible for his sister’s death.

Protagonist sets to reach the goal in relation to the events that motivate his or her

mission. And the main obstacles, necessarily, is the antagonist.

The word antagonist comes from the Greek words for ‘against’ (anti) and ‘struggles’

(agonists), therefore it could means that the antagonist is the force or obstacle with which the

protagonist must contend. It is often formed as a ‘villain’ of the story because it has

characteristics as a morally bad person who always confronts and defies the protagonist for

victory. However, the antagonist does not always have to be another human characters, it

could be a situation that is creating an obstacle in the path of the protagonist towards his or

her final goal. The example is in ‘Armageddon’ (1998) movie that use the giant asteroid

going to crash the world as the antagonist.