CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
IN CHILDREN LANGUAGE
A Thesis
Submitted to Post-Graduate School English Applied Linguistics Program in
Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Magister Humaniora
By:
NURHALIMAH SIREGAR Registration Number : 8126112023
ENGLISH APPLIED LINGUISTICS STUDY PROGRAM
POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL
STATE UNIVERSITY OF MEDAN
MEDAN
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
IN CHILDREN LANGUAGE
A Thesis
Submitted to Post-Graduate School English Applied Linguistics Program in
Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Magister Humaniora
By:
NURHALIMAH SIREGAR Registration Number : 8126112023
ENGLISH APPLIED LINGUISTICS STUDY PROGRAM
POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL
STATE UNIVERSITY OF MEDAN
MEDAN
ABSTRACT
Siregar. Nurhalimah. 8126112023. “Conversational Implicatures in Children Language”. English Applied Linguistics Study Program. PostGraduate School. State University of Medan. 2014.
ABSTRAK
Siregar. Nurhalimah. 8126112023. “Implikatur Percakapan pada Bahasa Anak ”.Linguistik Terapan Bahasa Inggris. Sekolah Pasca Sarjana. Universitas Negeri Medan. 2014.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In the name of Allah, The Loving and The Merciful. The very first of all, the writer’s endless and infinite gratitude is primarily expressed to Allah SWT as
The Creator, for His blessing and mercy that the writer can finish this thesis. In addition, shalawat to the Prophet Muhammad SAW also must be delivered for his loving that all people can be out of the darkness into the lightness especially in education as experienced by the writer today.
The writer would like to convey her great gratitute to her thesis advisors, Dr. Sri Minda Murni, M.S and Dr. Siti Aisyah Ginting, M.Pd, for their great ideas, guidance and patience that lead the writer to the end of this thesis completition. She should also thank to the board of examiners Prof. Dr. Busmin Gurning, M.Pd, Prof. Dr. Lince Sihombing, M.Pd and Dr. Zainuddin, M.Hum for their constructive comments, suggestions, and valuable time in improving this thesis.
The writer also would like to extend her sincere gratitute to the Head of LTBI, UNIMED, Prof, Dr. Busmin Gurning, M.Pd and his staff, Farid, for their assistance regarding the administrative procedures. In addition, the writer would like to thank to all lecturers for their knowledge and character building during the process of teaching and learning at classes or outside.
At this opportunity, the writer also express her thanks to her husband Juandi and her children Salwa Aisyah Fitri, Ahmad Najib and Alifah zahra for their loves and understanding during the writer’s time of studying and carrying
have been reduced because of the writer’s activity, especially in conducting this
research. Later,to the writer’s father in law, Jumarik for his endless spirit and
praying. The writer knows well how he always effort to give his attention for the writer’s success in all of her life sides.
Finally, the writer realizes that this thesis is still far from being perfect. Therefore, she really appreciates all of the constructive critics for its improvement.
Medan, July 2014
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHOD
3.1 The Research Design ……….……… 33
3.2 The Data and Source of Data .……….… 34
3.3 Instrument of the Data Collection……… 34
3.4 The Technique of Data Collection ………...………. 35
3.5 The Techniques of Data Analysis …….……… 36
3.6 The Trustworthiness of the Study ………..……... 38
CHAPTER IV DATA ANALYSIS, FINDINGS, AND DISCUSSION 4.1 Data Analysis... 42
4.1.1 Types of Conversational Implicatures……… .. 42
4.1.2 The process of Conversational Implicature………... 48
4.1.3 The Reason of Conversational Implicature……….. 56
4.2 Findings……… 61
4.3 Discussions……… 62
CHAPTER V CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS 5.1 Conclusions………. 65
5.2 Suggestions………. 65
LIST OF APPENDICES
APPENDIX I... 69
APPENDIX 2... 84
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
1.1The Background of the Study
Research in conversational implicature has proliferated in recent years. However, most of studies have tended to focus on adult understanding and use of this phenomenon. There seems to be an assumption that this phenomenon will not feature significantly in children language. Their language is deemed to lack presupposition, hidden intentions, subtlety and indirect meaning.
The phenomenon of Conversational Implicature which can briefly described at this point as, making an utterance mean more than what is said. In the researcher’s observation of children using language in naturalistic settings, she has
come across many instances of language use which have produced clear examples of conversational implicature. There are instances of conversational implicature where utterances carry a meaning beyond that which is literal. The following is an example where conversational implicature is used in making intention known. Example 1:
(Rafly has taken Hafis’ book without his permission. Hafis is displeased.)
Hafiz : Kau ambil bukuku kan? Kukasitau sama bu guru kau nanti ( You took
my book. I tell teacher later)
Hafis is issuing a threat to Rafly and Rafly understands it to be a threat. However Rafly attempts to strike a bargain with Hafis in conversational implicature.
Situation such as the above observed by the researcher have led her to hypothesize that children do hint and do exploit language for its non-literal potential and they do so very creatively.
Explaining the definition of conversational implicatures as it occurs on the children above, Grice ( 1975: 158) as the first person who introduces the term of implicature gives the notion of a conversational implicature as one kind of implicature beside a conventional implicature to account for the fact that sentence can imply things that are not directly encoded as part of their meaning. Instead, the implicatures are computed as a relation between what is said and what could have been said based on general principles of cooperation between participants in a conversation.
Grice (1975:158) formulates the Co-operative Principle as mentioned above as ‘Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it
occurs’, and the Co-operative Maxims or known as the Conversational Maxims as
the principle which consists of four maxims, namely; quality maxim, quantity maxim, relation maxim and manner maxim. Mulyana (2001:58) adds that the Co-operative principle has a character as the regulation for the Conversational Maxims. That’s why, normatively, in every conversation, both the speaker and the
are many cases of violation of the cooperative principles. It does not mean that it is the destruction or the failure of the communication but precisely as a deliberate effort from the speaker to affect the certain implicature such as for lying, making funny and just kidding.
In fact, Bates (1976) in Rohrig considers the study of pragmatics in child-language to be very important because it occupies the interface between linguistic, cognitive and social development and enables researcher to investigate children’s
developing mental processes and describes in her work that children go through three stages when acquiring pragmatics before their linguistic behaviour reaches the same level of linguistic competence as the one of adults.
The three stages of pragmatic acquisition are the Sensorimotor Period, which applies to 18 month-old babies; the Preoperational Period, which describes the pragmatic competence between the age of 18 months and 4 years and the Concrete Operational Period, which refers to four- to six-year-old children. Furthermore, she assumes that although very young children may sometimes fail to communicate their intention or idea successfully, they still mean it. This is because children’s knowledge of a language (competence) often differs from their
actual performance. In this case adults have to help to make the communication successful by inferring what the child wanted to say.
Although Bates’ pragmatic stages only describe the development of
intonation, linguistic humour such as irony, difference between form and meaning of words. This is because now children possess the ability to understand the details and notions of words that appear to have the same or similar meaning on the first glance.
Several previous studies prove that children’s acquisition of implicature in
different ages have different ability in using implicature. For example, as investigated by Lande (2003), in her thesis about pragmatics acquisition, she finds that a four and half-year-old child has acquired implicature, that is conversational implicature even in the very simple way. The other one is a study by Pessy (2006) which focuses on the speech acts and impicatures, she also has the same assumption as Lande’s that the types of implicature acquired by a four-year-old
child still in very limited concepts and just got in the purpose to express what the child wants.
In line with this description, the writer decides to investigate five years old children who include in the Concrete Operational Period acquire conversational implicatures. As we know that children in this period are considered to be active speakers with good speaking to communicate his mind. That’s why the writer is
interested in observing the children in this age.
1.2 The Problems of the Study
Based on the background of the study above, the problems are formulated in questions as the following:
2. How is the conversational implicature used by the children ? 3. Why is the conversational implicature used in the way it is?
1.3 The Objectives of the Study
In accordance with the problems of the study, the objectives of this research are:
1. to identify the types of conversational implicatures found in the utterances used by the children;
2. to describe how the conversational implicatures are used in the utterances produced by the children and
3. to give the reasons of conversational implicatures used in the children’s utterances.
1.4 The Scope of the Study
The writer conducts this study in the scope of conversational implicatures as one of the field in Pragmatics. The data is limited to the Indonesian words produced by five-years-old children at Taman Kanak-Kanak Islam Terpadu (TKIT) Permata Hati Tebing Tinggi.
1.5 The Significance of the Study
1. Theoretically, this study becomes the basic of the further research which is also interested in investigating the conversational implicature with different focus and object.
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
5.1 Conclusions
After deliberately analyzing the data, the conclusions are stated as follows:
1. The types of conversational implicatures namely conversational implicature was found in the children utterances.
2. The process of conversational implicatures namely by flouting maxims (quantity, relation and manner maxims) occurred in the children’s utterances. The processes are mostly meantly to get what the children wanted. When they wanted A, they did not say A directly, instead he said B.
3. There are various kinds of the child’s purposes as his reasons in uttering his sentences, namely to state opinion, to save selves by lying, and to avoid discomfort things.
5.2 Suggestions
Based on the conclusions stated above, this study has some suggestions to the readers with may be different positions as follows :
2. To parents or caregivers, it is suggested to use and trigger conversational implicatures to children since this pragmatics acquisition is the most meaningful study in language.
3. To teachers, school interaction can be a good environment in helping children to increase their competences in communication. One of the competence is using conversational implicature. That’s why, it is expected
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