PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF WHATSAPP CHATS
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1.Theoretical Framework
Research is an investigation, examination, scrutiny, experiments that require thoroughness by using methods. research can be called a systematic effort to organize and investigate problems, and answer emerging questions, related to the facts, phenomena, or symptoms of the problem.
Research begins with a statement because it requires a clear description of the problem to be solved. but in a research, the researcher should limit its research so that the directions and answers of the study are not confusing or run from the proper path.
The theoretical framework in this research used the Grice’s theory. Grice has an important role in the development of language in the pragmatic part that is based on utterances or conversations. the research on the conversations will be attributed to the implicatures that are divided into two kinds namely, conventional implicatures and conversational implicatures.
This research discussed about the case of statements uploaded in social media such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and another which is done by the human and related to the pragmatics study especially implicature. When two people are doing chatting, one will ask and the other will answer, and vice versa. The two participants will exchange information with each other, and when one or both have interesting topics of conversation, chatting events may take a long time. But sometimes the spoken utterance can contain an action that must be understood by both parties who are chatting. Therefore, the conversation is very instrumental in a communication. In an introductory conversation through the media chat on WhatsApp is found a lot of expressive speech acts. The expressive speech act is manifested through phrases when talking and doing an conversation.
In speaking, speakers will also pay attention to the context, clarity of speech and ensure that the spoken is easily understood by the interlocutor. Although a speech has the same implications and spoken in two different situations, the volume and situation will be different. If the implications are not found in a speech, it can be assumed that speakers and spouses have not cooperated in communication or in other words the speaker has committed a violation of principles of co-operation and violation of the principle of decency. violation of these two principles are no exception occurs also in the conversation through the media chat on WhatsApp.
2.2.Pragmatic
Pragmatics is the study about aspects of meanings and languages use that depend on speakers, recipients and other features of the speech context. Bublitz & Norrick (2011:19) said:
“Pragmatics is fundamentally concerned with communicative action in any kind of context. The multifaceted research paradigm of pragmatics has provided new directions and perspectives in the arts and humanities, philosophy, cognitive science, computer science and the social sciences.
Pragmatic perspectives have been employed in information technology and in the social sciences, particularly in economics, politics and education. pragmatics has many studies that are often attributed to the meanings of many utterances spoken by people. pragmatics refers to context-based language use studies. Mira Ariel (2008:21) said:
“Pragmatics has been notoriously hard to define or rather, it has proven quite impossible to reconcile between the patterning of phenomena assumed to be classical pragmatic topics (deixis and reference, speech acts, conversational and conventional implicatures, presuppositions, functional syntax) and the common set of definitions for pragmatics (most notably, context dependency, inferentiality, nontruth conditionality and others).”
In order to resolve the delimitation problem of the field, it is forced to be the first abandon of the expectation that all the definitional criteria converge on classifying some phenomenon as pragmatic.
Wolfram Bublitz and Neal R. Norrick (2011:19) In the pragmatic perspective, language use and language users in interaction are primary, as opposed to language as a system of signs or a set of rules”. The pragmatic perspective scrutinizes neither just individual words nor sentences nor even isolated texts, but rather whole speech events or language games in real social contexts, considering both the present state of affairs and its connectedness with priorand succeeding actions. It rejects a localization of language in a limited segment of the acts of speaking, understanding and responding or within the conscious of the individual. It supplants a view of language as an abstraction without variation by speaker, region or time, of language as a non- cultural, non-social, static, depersonalized fact independent of context and discourse.
2.3. Context
Context is seen as a dynamic construct, which is interactionally organized in and through the process of communication ,Bublitz & Norrick 2011:34). Meanwhile, Yule (1996:24) discusses the context in relation to a person's ability to identify referents that depend on one or more of the person's understanding of the referenced expression. In connection with the explanation, Yule distinguishes context and co- texs. The context he defines as the physical environment in which a word is used. Co- text by Yule is a linguistic material that helps understand an expression. Co-text is the linguistic part of the environment in which an expression is used.
According to Michael L. Scott (2009:126) the context based on to the use of language can be divided into four kinds, namely as follows.
a. Physical context that covers where the use of language in a communication.
b. An epstemic context or background of knowledge shared by both speakers and their partners.
c. A linguistic context consisting of sentences or utterances that precede and follow certain utterances in a communication event, this linguistic context is also called the term koteks.
d. The social context of social relations and background that complement the relationship between speakers and partners said.
2.4. Cooperative Principle
Cooperative is a term often used in linguistic literature to characterise human behaviour in conversation (Nelson, D. & P. Foulkes, 2000:26). The cooperative as an essential factor in an interacting between the speakers and listeners, in other words, the listener suppose the speaker to convey true statements and say nothing except the listener is required.
Levinson (1983:38) the principle of cooperation with a number of maxims specializes in what the participants can do to speak in an efficient, rational, and cooperative way. When conveying information, between the speaker and the spoken partner must speak finely, relevantly, and clearly.
Grice (1991: 309) said:
“the conversation will lead to the equalization of elements in the original cooperation transaction is different. messages that can be said to be well on the participants said,it is necessary to consider the principle of clarity, principle of density, and principle continuity. These principles are fully incorporated into principles cooperation by Grice.”
The cooperative principle requires the speakers contribute to what kind of conversation is desired, at which stage the contribution is requested, and accordance with the objectives and direction already received from the communication. Thus, the conversation must be clear, solid, and straightforward in order to be understood by the speaker or the other person.
The cooperative principle supported by conversations maxim based on Gricean Maxims theory, namely: maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim relevance, maxim of manner. (Grice, 1989:26).
2.4.1.Maxim of Quantity
In the maxim of quantity, a speaker is expected to be sufficient and informative as may be required. Such information should not exceed the information that the speaker needs.
Quantity maxim :
1. Make its contribution as informative as is required.
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than required.
Example of maxim of quantity: dialogue 1
A :I want to choose Ana to be my girlfriend than Novita.
-Improper:
B : wow, that is a good idea, Ana is a beautiful girl.
-Proper:
B: I think Novita is more beautiful than Ana.
B gives the sufficient information properly about Ana and Novita also told him the clear and honest information.
2.4.2.Maxim of Quality
The maxim of Quality, join the provision of contributions which are genuine rather than spurious (truthful rather than mendacious), does not seem to be just one among a number of recipes for producing contributions; it seems rather to spell out the difference between something’s being, and (strictly speaking) failing to be, any kind of contribution at all. False information is not an inferior kind of information; it just is not information. (Grice 1989: 371).
Quality maxim :
1. Do not say what you believe to be false
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence
Example of maxim of quality: dialogue 2
A : Why did you choose Herni to be your girlfriend?
-Improper:
B : Herni has a sharp noise and straight hair, her skin is smooth and white, she also has a good eyes.
-Proper:
B : Herni is beautiful.
B contribute the the truthful to A and does say the statement that has no evidence.
2.4.3.Maxim of Relevance
The Maxim of relevance requires that each conversation participant make a contribution relevant to the subject matter of the conversation. In the maxims of relationship or relevance, it is stated that in order to establish good cooperation between speakers and listeners, one should be able to make a relevant contribution about something being said.
Maxim of Relevance : 1. Be relevant Example of maxim of relevance: dialogue 3
A : There is somebody at the door
B : I’m in the bath.
When A tells B that someone is coming in their doorstep and hopes B to open the door for the guest, then B says that he was in the bathroom at the time. B’s answer implies that he expects A to understand where B is at that moment, so B can not open the door and see who is coming at that moment.
2.4.4.Maxim of Manner
Maxim of manner stated that the contributions of the speakers should be perspicuous.
Manner maxim : 1. Be perspicuous.
2.Avoid obscurity of expression.
3.Avoid ambiguity.
4.Be brief. (Avoid unnecessary prolixity.)
5.Be orderly.
Example of maxim of manner: dialogue 4 A : Mom, let’s out to have a lunch
B : Ok, but not in M-c-D-O-N-A-L-D
In the dialogue above, A rejected to have a lunch in McDonald with her child
through the spelling of word “McDonald”.
2.5. Implicature
The notion of implicature, proposed by Grice (1967) is well known as a part of pragmatics discussion. In order to characterize the way in which implicatures contribute to changes in the representation of the context, I will recall some of their salient features. Implicature can be interpreted as additional meanings conveyed by speakers that are sometimes not contained in the speech itself. Laurence (2006: 3) said:
“Implicature is a component of speaker meaning that constitutes an aspect of what is meant in a speaker’s utterance without being part of what is said. what a speaker intends to communicate is characteristically far richer than what she directly expresses; linguistic meaning radically underdetermines the message conveyed and understood”.
Speaker (abbreviated with S) tacitly exploits pragmatic principles to bridge this gap and counts on hearer (abbreviated with H) to invoke the same principles for the purposes of utterance interpretation.
Davis (2007: 5) said that Implicature is what a speaker's utterance implies (or means) is commonly equated with what the speaker implies rather than what the sentence uttered, or the uttering of it, implies. implicature as technical terms denoting "the act of meaning or implying something by saying something else." Consider the following dialogue 1:
(1) ANN: Where can I get gasoline?
BOB: There's a station around the corner.
In the case above, Ann is getting a trouble to find out the place of gasoline sale and then Bob ask Ann to go to the station. Nevertheless, Bob did not actually say that Ann can get gasoline there. So Bob has implicated it. What Bob said, and therefore did not implicate, is just that there is a gasoline station around the corner.
2.5.1.The types of Implicature
2.5.1.1.Conversational Implicature
The conversational implicature is an implicative statement such as what the speaker meant, implied or intended is different what the speaker is said in a conversation. Kasmirli (2016: 2), conversational implicature is the practice of conveying one thing by saying another. The conversational implicature often occured because the fact on a utterance which has implication such as argument that is not actually part of the utterance.
Koutoupis (2005:13) said: “conversational implicature, therefore, is worked out on the assumption that the cooperative principle is observed”. it means that every assumption in observation that contained about conversational implicature must be related to cooperative principle. however, it is mostly generated via an apparent violation of it. A participant in a talk-exchange may fail to fulfil a maxim in a variety of ways.
Lewis (2013:23) said: “Conversational implicature bridges the divide between direct speech acts (generally referred to as “literal meaning” in the experimental literature) and indirect speech acts (“speaker meaning”). The challenge for
computational-level theories of implicature is to explain the logic of the relation between these two levels of meaning.
Yule (1996: 39) said: “conversational implicature is derived from “a general principle of conversation plus a number of maxims which speaker normally obeys.
- Generalized Conversational Implicature
Generalized Conversational Implicature is the implicit wich does need the special context. Generalized conversational implicatures, on the other hand, are not on text dependent in this way; the words used ‘would normally (in the absence of special circumstances) carry such-and-such an implicature or type of implicature’ (Grice 1975/1989:37). Laurence (2006: 6) said that: “the inference – that the speaker does not know in which of the two locations the cat can be found – is induced in the absence of a special or marked context. The context of implicatures allows a meaningful functional explanation of linguistic facts that are unattainable by linguistic theory. The concept of implicature provides an explicit explanation.
Implicature Can provide explanations of meaning or linguistic facts that are unattainable by linguistic theories even can provide a firm explanation of the outward difference of the intended of the language user. Conaplin (2012: 9) “For example, when it says that some people have already arrived, we also imply that not all people have arrived. The second refers to an inference by an addressee concerning the truth of a proposition expressed in a particular subordinate or coordinate clause. The
addressee infers that the proposition may or may not be true. If we believe that tomorrow will be raining, it is also possible that tomorrow will be sunny.
Example: dialogue 2
Anto : did you invite Rido and Della to my birthday party? Herman : I invited Della.
Anto is celebrating his birthday’s party and herman attends it. When Anto asking herman about his invitations to Rido and Della, Herman answers that he just invited Della. Herman said ”I invited della” but he did not say to Anto that he did not invite Rido to Herman’s party. By the Herman utterance, Anto can conclude that Herman did not invite Rido or Forgotten.
B.Particularized conversational implicature
Particularized conversational implicature is strongly tied to the particular features of the context. In this specific context, locally recognized inferences are assumed (Yule 1996: 42). Generally, this conversational implicature will lead to the violation of Gricean’s maxims. When someone asks whether the wedding goes well, and the answer is that some young men got really drunk, we can imply that the wedding did not go well.
Bart Geurts (2010: 54) said: particularized conversational implicature which is a nonconventional implicature based on an addressee’s assumption that the speaker is following the conversational maxims or at least the cooperative principle. For example: dialogue 3
Joey : Mind if I sit down?
Lorelai : Actually, I’m meeting someone.
In Lorelai’s answer is irrelevant with Joey’s question. She rejects his request with an information which has an implication that Lorelai minds Joey sits beside her because she has an appointment with someone. Lorelai’s utterance in rejection Joey’s request flouts the maxim of relation.
2.5.1.2. Conventional Implicature
The conventional implicature is the implicature that determined by the meaning of the words used". The point is a general sense, all people generally already know about the purpose or understanding of certain things. Davis (2007: 133) said: “a convention is a regularity in the voluntary action of a group that is socially useful, self-perpetuating, and arbitrary. To be socially useful is to serve a mutual interest, something that people want not only for themselves but for others or for society as a whole. Linguistic conventions are socially useful because they serve a mutual interest in communication.Davis (2007: 188) said: “implicature conventions can attach to the meanings expressed rather than the particular words expressing them, and the same meanings are often expressed widely.
Example: dialogue 4
Rudi : Hi, I am Rudi, I came from Medan
Daniel : Are you Bataknese? Your accent is too rude.
The implication of Daniel's saying is that speaking with Rudi's rough accent is a consequence because he is a bataknese. if Rudi is not a Bataknese person, it certainly does not imply that he speaks in Rudi's rude accent because he is Bataknese.
2.6.Conversation
All of people in this world must have doing conversation with each other. usually they often doing conversations with the people who are closest to them like their father, mother, brother and their friends even also the stranger. conversation is an interaction between two or more people in order to make a good relationship one each other or solve the solution of some problems. Conversation is one of the most prevalent uses of human language. All human beings engage in conversational interaction and human society depends on conversation.
Liddicoat (2009: 1) said: “Conversation is the way in which people socialize and develop and sustain their relationships one each other. when people converse they
engage in a form of linguistic communication, but there is much more going on in a conversation than just the use of a linguistic code. Much that is important in conversation is carried out by things other than language, including eye gaze and body posture, silences and the realworld context in which the talk is produced.
Brennan (2010:3): “Conversation is a joint activity in which two or more participants use linguistic forms and nonverbal signals to communicate interactively. A conversation is not simply a sequence of messages expressed as speaking turns, produced by speakers, and received and decoded by addressees.
2.7. Social Media
Social media is a medium to socialize with each other through online that allows humans to interact with each other without being limited to the space and time. Social media is used for many things in life, such as connecting with others, entertainment, networking with colleagues and college friends.
The use of social media does not only change the way people communicate, but also change people in business, change government communication, and change people's lives.
Baruah (2012:2) “The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue”. Social media takes on many different forms including magazines, Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating
and social bookmarking. With the world in the midst of a social media revolution, it is more than obvious that social media like facebook, twitter, orkut, myspace, skype etc., are used extensively for the purpose of communication. This form of communication can be with a person or a group of persons.
Nowadays, WhatsApp (WA) is one of the most popular social media that often used by people especially in indonesia.
2.7.1. WhatsApp (WA)
WhatsApp (WA) is an instant messaging application for smartphones, when viewed through its function WhatsApp is almost similar with the regular SMS app that often used used by people in old phone. but WhatsApp does not use pulses, but internet data. Mefolere (2016: 14) said:
“WhatsApp is an application available on the new generation smart phones like IPhone, Android, Blackberry, Samsung, Sony that allows users to send text messages to each other for free. Users are not charged for a text sent through WhatsApp”.
This is because WhatsApp sends messages through an internet data connection also.
Samuel Babu (2017: 11) “WhatsApp is the most globally popular messaging app. WhatsApp Inc. was founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum to make communication and the distribution of multimedia messaging more easily and faster.
Everybody who has smartphone can download WhatsApp application through the playstore application for free.
Smileys and Emoji
The smiley faces vary from elated to angry. Most of them do not inherently have anything to do with emotion. Many are random objects like a rose, a camera, a foot (for when one wants to end conversation like the opening credits to Monty Python’s Flying Circus), or a piece of Sushi
WhatsApp, pragmatics and discourse
WhatsApp Messenger is a rather-new, highly popular means of communication that employs instant messaging (Sanchez-Moya & Cruz-Moya, 2015). Up to February 2016, WhatsApp total users reached one billion, whereas, in July 2017, 55 billion messages were sent by one billion users per day in 60 languages. In addition to the text messages, this application allows its users to use real-time texting or communication, which can allow them to exchange information and media content (Ahad & Lim, 2014). These include emoticons, images, pictures, voice notes, videos, weblinks and so on. WhatsApp users also have the privilege of creating their own digital profiles with their personal information. The users are encouraged to attach a photo, along with a status with a 139-character status, where they can describe their online persona (Sanchez-Moya & Cruz- Moya, 2015).
From a pragmatic perspective, WhatsApp users produce a meaningful linguistic expression, which is known as the locutionary act. This expression is produced with a purpose, the illocutionary act. Any expression of this kind is intended to have an effect on the reader or hearer, which is termed as the perlocutionary act (Yule, 1996). The features in WhatsApp, therefore, can provide some pragmatic functions that lead us to new insights. In addition, the texts used in WhatsApp are believed to share elements from both written and spoken varieties of the language (Sanchez-Moya & Cruz-Moya, 2015). Yus (2011) lists some of the most frequent strategies that users do to oralise written text, including phonetic, colloquial, and prosodic spellings. This indeed gives hybrid flavour which is neither written nor spoken, but something with its own characteristics (Maizarevalo, 2015). All this is vital for users to reshape themselves, and to create the effect they intend to have on their contacts (readers).
On the other hand, the discursive, communicative and other forms of interaction are monitored by social cognition which “mediates between micro- and macro- levels of society, between discourse and action and between the individual and the group” (Van Dijk, 1993, p. 257). The micro aspects concern the linguistic choices, whereas the macro levels involve global meanings (the schematic representations). The analysis of themes can also be grounded on Fairclough’s conventions that “ideologies reside in texts”, that “it is not possible to ‘read off’ ideologies from texts” and that “texts are open to diverse interpretations” (Fairclough, 1995, p.71). WhatsApp users, therefore, righteously exploit the space given in these notifications to expose their own beliefs and ideologies to others. These texts, therefore, can be an excellent resource for researchers to disclose the hidden messages expressed within.
Previous studies
WhatsApp has undergone a decent bulk of research in various disciplines. Some studies were undertaken in relation to WhatsApp as a popular SMS text messaging platform (e.g., Church, & de Oliveira, 2013; O'Hara et al., 2014). Other studies were concerned with studying the users’ purposes of using WhatsApp as a social media technology (e.g., Robin et al., 2017). Much more attention has been given to the use of WhatsApp messenger in the teaching and learning of language (e.g., Amry, 2014; Lam, 2015; Al Shekaili, 2016; Binti Mistar & Embi, 2016; Sayan, 2016; Marçal, et al., 2016; So, 2016; and Hassan Taj et al., 2017; Ali et al., 2019). Some studies also were conducted with respect to the pragmatic aspects of WhatsApp messages (e.g., Otemuyiwa, 2017; Ueberwasser & Stark, 2017; Yus, 2017; Lestari, 2019). In terms of studying the language in WhatsApp status notification; however, the amount of research is still in its infancy (Sanchez-Moya & Cruz-Moya, 2015). In quest for research work related to this area, three studies have been found, and thus reviewed below.
One chief relevant study regarding WhatsApp status notifications was conducted by Sanchez-Moya & Cruz-Moya (2015). The study is intended to identify the most recurrent pragmatic uses of the discursive realizations of a corpus of WhatsApp notifications by looking at the multimodality that these statuses give. The study used a corpus of 400 WhatsApp statuses for users of different ages. The findings outlined a five-label taxonomy for the recurrent realizations of the statuses. The first two are self-generated and automatic-generated statuses. The self- generated types were also found to come under four categories: purely-verbal, hybrid, purely- iconic and blank.
Al-Khawaldeh et al. (2016) is another research work that deals with WhatsApp status notifications. The focus of the study was the discursive and thematic analysis of the WhatsApp statuses. The study was intended to find out both the major characteristics and purposes of the notifications and the gender differences in this regard. To achieve these gaols, a corpus of 300 statuses by users from Jordan was examined. Analyzing the data qualitatively, the study found the major characteristics to run under five streams: personal, social, religious and political. The most recurrent type was personal, social and cultural, whereas the last one was religious.
Al-Smadi (2017) investigated the WhatsApp statuses from a sociolinguistic point of view by looking at the differences according to the age of the users as well as the gender. Using a qualitative method, the study investigated 400 statuses for two groups of participants: those under 30 years old, and those above 30 years old. The results of the study showed differences in the age, as well as the gender of the users. The study found that the religious status was the most frequent among female users, whereas the social status was the most numerous among male users.
The above studies have provided a good glimpse of how these statuses are used. This study, moreover, aims to shed further light into this scarcely researched area (Sanchez-Moya & Cruz- Moya, 2015; Al-Khawaldeh et al., 2016; Ueberwasser & Stark, 2017) by combining both the discursive realizations and the pragmatic themes.