Arabic Verbal Humor: An Exploration of Non-Observance of Cooperative Principle on Social Media
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1406.27Keywords:
Cooperative Principle, Coronavirus, flouting, verbal humor, violatingAbstract
This paper explores how Jordanians violated and flouted Grice's Cooperative Principle maxims and the purposes behind their non-observance in creating Arabic humor related to the COVID-19 pandemic on AlMamlaka and Roya Jordanians' Facebook accounts. The study conducted qualitative content analysis on 12 Facebook comments from March to September 2020 and found that Jordanians violated and flouted all the maxims to convey their hidden messages. The analysis revealed that the purposes of the non-observance were to generate implicatures and highlight various issues faced by Jordanians during the pandemic. These issues included government announcements, non-compliance with health guidelines, conspiracy theories about the virus's origin, impacts on family relationships, discomfort from wearing masks, the boredom of lockdown and some geographical areas targeted for their early source of spreading the virus. The findings indicate that humor can serve as an effective tool for highlighting social and political issues. The study recommends exploring the non-observance of cooperative maxims in different contexts and how it affects the interpretation and reception of humor. Overall, the study suggests that humor played a significant role in addressing and discussing the situation in Jordan during the pandemic.
References
Afaldi, M.N. & Nia Kurniasih. (2019). Flouting of conversational maxims in comments on social media Instagram. Proceedings Universitas Pamulang, pp. 597–603.
Al Kayed, M. (2019). An analysis of Jordanian jokes: A pragmatic study of humour. Global Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, 7(1), 13-20.
Andresen, N. (2014). Flouting the maxims in comedy: An analysis of flouting in the comedy series Community. (Undergraduate Project, Karlstads University). Retrieved from http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:704301/fulltext01.pdf.June, 2023. June, 2023.
Atei, A. S., & Al-Azzawi, Q. O. (2021). Racial Jokes on Twitter: A Pragmatic Study. Multicultural Education, 7(12), 787-791.
Attardo, S. (1994). Theories of Humor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.787-791.
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Speech acts (pp. 41-58). Brill.
Hassani, N. (2019). The flouting maxim on Twitter influencers’ tweets. Journal of Pragmatics Research, 1(2), 139-155.
Hasyim, M., Arafah, B., & Kuswarini, P. (2020, October). The new Toraja destination: adding value ‘Toraja coffee’of the sustainable tourism development. In IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science (Vol. 575, No. 1, p. 012072). IOP Publishing.
Kaab, A. W. Z. (2019). Pragmatic analysis on jokes spoken by participants of 8 out of 10 cats does countdown (Doctoral dissertation, Universitas Islam Negeri Maulana Malik Ibrahim).
Levinson, S. C., Levinson, S. C., & Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge university press.
Masaeli, B., & Heidari-Shahreza, M. A. (2017). A linguistic analysis of para-jokes and meta-jokes in Persian verbal humor. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Language Research, 4(1), 109-115.
Mey, J. L. (2001). Pragmatics: an introduction. John Wiley & Sons.
Nastiti, A. P. (2018). The Use of Implicature to Create Humor as Cooperative Principle Violation on Humorous Advertisement. Undergraduate Thesis. Semarang: Universitas Diponegoro.
Nastri, J., Pena, J. & Hancock, J.T. (2006). The construction of away messages: A speech act analysis. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(4): 1025–1045.
Ogunbge, E. O., & Omolabi, I. (2020). The pragmatics of Coronavirus motivated humour on the social media. All Nations University Journal of Applied Thought, 8(1), 1-20.
Taha, G. (2016). Humor Expressing Suffering and Resistance during January 25. Revolution. Ain Shams Journal, Vol. 44. http: 10.21608/AAFU.2016.9648.
Taberski, D. (1998). A Gricean analysis of a situation comedy. Theses Digitization Project 1439.
Thomas, J. (1995). Meaning in Interaction: An introduction to Pragmatic. London &New York: Longman.
