Flouting and Violation of the Maxim of Quantity in Shakespeare’s Hamlet | ||
| AL-AMEED JOURNAL | ||
| Article 1, Volume 3, Issue 2, April 2014, Pages 29-57 | ||
| Author | ||
| Dr. Muayyad Omran Chiad | ||
| Abstract | ||
| This study focuses on analysing the extent to which the maxim of quantity is either violated or flouted by the main characters in the play “Hamlet” by Shakespeare. The reason for selecting this play is that it has a tragedy genre and it is famous among the most tragedies. In addition , the play tackles many themes which are timeliness and they transcend time and space in themselves and still present in the modern world such as familial relationships, beingness of ghosts, political conflicts , struggles with a mother, stepfather, and beloved, surveillance and what happens after death . If this is the case, then the play is old, yet modern therefore it is a kind of super-literature. It is expected that characters favorably and expectedly either violate or flout the conversational maxims through the talkative trait in which people frequently disobey these maxims in order to achieve certain purposes. Therefore, it is noteworthy to take a close look at conversational exchanges in such a play. The findings of this study indicate that in many occasions the characters violated the maxim of quantity. Based on the findings of the study, it can be concluded that, people frequently violate this maxim in order to accomplish certain goals although cooperative principles describe the optimal practices in interaction in order to promote the process of conversation to be smoother for the interactants. In most of the instances, Polonius was talkative, redundant, and occasionally uninformative, and sometimes goes to the other extreme when too little information was given and these factors were in line with his genuine character in the play. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Flouting; Violation; Maxim; Quantity; Shakespeare | ||
|
Statistics Article View: 47 PDF Download: 4 |
||