Meaning and PragMatisM : the Violations of MaxiMs in truth analysis in the tV series Lie to Me ( 2010 )

Grice proposed the Cooperative Principle, which contains four maxims, as an element in communication. When the four maxims is violated, it means that the speaker has did something to create a condition, particularly in crime investigation. The truth condition, which has relation to lie, is frequently happen in people’s life. Lie can be studied pragmatically within the relevance theory. The focus of this study is to analyze the existence of which maxims may be violated in a lie. The study on the characters in TV series Lie to Me shows that each character violates certain maxims in the same time. The reason for selecting Lie to Me, there are various ways and reasons to violate the maxims. The finding of this study that one from four maxims is rarely violated because of a possibility reason. However, it cannot be justified that people are lying means they feel guilty toward crime action. Also, it can be helpful to understand what is the Cooperative Principle theory for linguistic learners. Keyword Gricean maxims, the Cooperative Principle, Lie to me, violation of maxims


IntroductIon
Communication is a verbal skill to communicate with each other, and this makes it an important role in every aspects of a human's life.Communication itself consists of sentences of a particular language, which is used by speakers to express their feelings.
However, if a user does not understand the language to communicate with other people, the purpose of the communication cannot be accomplished.When people communicate, they create various conditions; depending on the kind of topic they are talking about.
The way to express what people want to say to the others is by saying it directly and indirectly, which can be successful or not.Indirectness occurs when an utterance fails to express, and then a speaker uses implication in the utterance to fulfill a certain purpose.
People will look for information about a meaning that comes from the context of utterance (Jaszczolt 03), it means that the hearer draws an assumption from the speaker's intentions and builds the implied meaning.
In communication, the speaker and the hearer have to contribute and respond to the information that has been discussed, and this is supposed to be a useful information to them.The rule is that they have to understand each other's utterance.To reach the purpose of communication, both of speaker and hearer have to fulfill the Cooperative Principle, which according to Grice consists of four maxims (1975).The maxims are the Maxim of Relevance, the Maxim of Quality, the Maxim of Quantity, and the Maxim of Manner.Grice defines the Cooperative Principle, as "making your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged" (1975).Below are the principles of the four maxims that Grice created to make sure that the utterance connects what we say and the things itself.
First, the maxim of quantity, it means that a speaker should be as informative as is required.As a result, the speaker does circumlocution or not being straight to the point.
In addition, the speaker should not give information too much or too little.When people do not give enough information, it means that the hearer may not be able to identify what they are talking about.In contrast, people who give too much information will make the hearer boring.They also have a tendency to repeat certain words because the speaker wants to make circumlocution or not to the point.The purpose of this maxim is to present that a statement is strong or informative.For example Tim: You know, Barry, this was a very strange way to meet, but I think everything happens for a reason.Barry: Wow! Wow! Did you just make that up?Tim: Yeah! Barry : 'Everything happens for a reason!'I like that.Tim: Thanks, Anyway!Tomorrow, I'm having dinner with some friends.Barry: Are you?Oh, that's incredible.Congratulations!Tim: I was wondering.Would you like to join us? (Khosravizadeh 04) Second, the maxim of Quality, it means that a speaker is expected to be sincere because the speaker is not assumed to say anything that it believes to be false or lack of evidence.Some speakers like to draw their hearer's attention to the fact that they are only saying what they believe to be true, and that they lack adequate evidence.People who violate maxim of quality will deliver a statement by using sarcastic tone to express a statement, which is different from the literal meaning to tease others.It can show that the speaker denies or distorts information.For example: Teacher: Wow! You're such a punctual fellow!Welcome to the class.Student: Sorry sir!It won't happen again.

(Khosravizadeh 09)
The maxim of Relevance means that a speaker is assumed to be saying information that is relevant to what has been said before.During the conversation, a hearer compares new information with knowledge that the hearer already has, focus on the information, which is most related to the knowledge, and lastly make an assumption about the speaker's intention by processing the information (Hu 05).As a result, the speaker does the wrong causality to support he or she words because he or she wants to avoid about the topic.For example: Fourth, the maxim of Manner means that a speaker uses ambiguous language to exaggerate information.Moreover, the speaker uses slang in front of people who do not understand it.The speaker is expected to say something briefly and in an orderly manner.For example: Wife: Darling….. What's the story with that new watch on your wrist?Husband: Oh, this watch you're talking about!I knew it… I told my boss that my wife would be curious when she sees it.Oh, honey you have no idea how much they're satisfied with my performance, lately!(Khosravizadeh 03) Grice had already made the guidelines for the speaker to be cooperative in having the conversation.When a speaker violates a maxim, the speaker deliberately ceases to apply the maxims to persuade a hearer to infer the hidden meaning behind the utterances.Nevertheless, violation of the maxims is what happens when people are telling a lie because the conversation between the speaker and the hearer cannot be successful, and they will not understand each other.A lie takes an importance part in communicative competence, and an incorporates as a natural way to survive and cover up a secret from the speaker, which is the hearer only catch up the surface meaning of the speaker's words.As a result, there is always a different meaning between what it is said and what is meant, which is called as utterance (Jaszczolt 03).It is important to understand what an utterance is because the utterance always gives a contextual implicit and explicit meaning, the meanings built have a relation with truth-condition, it is to find out that a given suspect is guilty (or not guilty), and responsible or not for something (Dutra 13).Truth is necessary to connect evidence with the verdict given.By knowing a contextual meaning of an utterance, it must be easier to find out what is exactly said (the proposition of the conversation) (Malinowski 07).The procedure of an utterance is depicted in the following diagram: First, the hearer hears an utterance, and then find out what exactly is said (proposition).To understand that a context is needed by looking at the appropriate possible words between utterances and proposition this has a context.Then, between proposition and meaning, there is a possibility, which comes from the speaker.Those aspects cannot be separated to each other.As a result, the hearer will be able to establish the meaning of the given sentence.(See figure 1) In recent years, a research on truth analysis, the particular view of linguistic meaning and of blame for violation that relies on intention-seeking, has been done several times before.However, some of the previous researches only discussed the theory of truth analysis without giving specific data to support it.One of the researches discussed the violation of maxims in comedy.The purpose of the research was to examine how violation could be also used to create humor.It is common for comedy genre creates violation to reach certain purpose, and the same thing applies in truth analysis.Therefore, it has a relation with my topic about truth analysis based on utterance because it shows the correlation between what is said and what is implicated.Truth-conditional presents the best-developed approach to the sentence meaning (Jaszczolt 02).To analyze that, a structure is not only standard truth-conditional analysis, but people also have to look deeper information about meaning from utterance.The pragmatic theory contributes to the truth-conditional content, so it is really interesting to see that truth condition comes from utterances, not sentences.
In the real life, people have a tendency to lie because they believe that a lie is the natural tool to survive and to avoid them from anything that may put them in an inappropriate condition (qtd. in Tupan 02), and then break the Cooperative Principle.
Since, people do not have a natural ability to predict which story is true or not, it is not easy to determine specific attitudes as a lie.As a result, an utterance is required to understand that.This is pictured in the American TV series entitled Lie to Me (2010).It is about crime investigation set in America.Lie to Me is centered on four characters: Dr. Cal Lightman, Dr. Foster, Eli Loker, and Ria Torres, which have different skills in "reading" people when they are lying.This series helps to understand that in crime investigation the truth can be revealed from utterance, which happens in an investigation itself.Most suspects often violated the maxims in their lie.Lie to Me can be relevant sample as a case study because this series consists with many dialogues of liars.I choose Lie to Me because it is one of the most popular series, and Lie to Me won two awards at the 37th People's Choice Awards in 2011.Besides that, the main characters were inspired on real characters, so the utterances on the series, which came from suspects, were happen in real investigation.Truth analysis may not popular, but I want to analyze something new by using that TV series.I argue that when people lie the purpose can be good or bad for both the speakers and the hearers.I believe liars have certain way or pattern to violate the maxims, which shows the distance from the truth.I will focus only on the dialogues, which have a lot of violation during investigation.
In this study, I will use the Conversational Maxims suggested by Grice (1975).I will collect the data from the movie series on television entitled Lie to Me (2010) which consists with utterance from liars.I will pick five episodes to analyze, then, I will classify the violations of maxim per episode.I will mention the conversation, and then I will identify the findings and the reason why the speaker violated the maxims.In addition, this study will be helpful to understand Grice's theory, the Cooperative Principle, especially to improve the understanding of maxims violation from utterances specifically when a person lies.

Methodology
I will choose five episodes (Better Half, Love Always, Undercover, Honey, Truth or Consequences) from season one and two, which contains interesting problems, conflicts, and lies among the characters.I chosen those episodes because the characters who violated the maxims did not mean that they were suspects of the crime, also the episodes contain unordinary stories with complicated cases.I will use descriptive study to analyze the utterances.The data will be indentified by using Conversational Maxims suggested by Grice (1975).First, I will classify the violations by using table consists of speaker, utterances, and checklist of violations.In the table, I will use acronym QN which stands for quantity, QL for quality, RL for relevance, and MN for manner.

dIscussIon
As I have mentioned before, the aim of this research is to find the violations of maxims, which are caused by the characters in TV series Lie to Me.The data were collected by identifying the conversations that contained a lie.The characters have different purposes when violating the maxims.The speaker did want to hurt someone feeling, or the speaker wanted to build someone's belief, so he or she could convince the hearer with no doubt.This can be seen in the following excerpts: Excerpt 1: The Lightman Group was hired to help with an arson case, which contained with an affair conflict between the suspect and the victim of arson case.
( Note: QN = Quantity, QL = Quality, RL = Relevance, MN = Manner It can be seen that the woman did multiple violations.She violated the maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, and maxim of relevance.At the beginning of the conversation, Dr. Lightman asked her about the relationship, but she answered with a question answer, which is the speaker did not to the point and informative (violated the maxim of quantity).
She did not answer the question by saying yes or no; instead, she was angry because Dr.
Lightman asked in front of her son.It shows that she denied something about the truth (violated maxim of quality) by switch the topic.She wanted to convince Dr. Lightman by using angry words which is make the answer unmatched with the topic 'I am getting my son and I am going' (violated the maxim of relevance).Dr. Lightman asked the same questions until three times, but the woman covered the truth, and focused that the questions were impolite to ask in front of her son.Actually, it is obvious that the woman were having an affair, but those answers were safe answers to hide the truth that the speaker felt.There are some possibilities why the woman did want to tell the truth.She made an image that she did not guilty, though, she lied because she did want to tell the truth in front of her son.
Overall, the woman did three violations to save her secret, and to protect herself.When the woman answered the first question, she showed an action that she did not want to be cooperating by saying uninformative answer (violated the maxim of quantity).She also answered with ambiguous answer (violated the maxim of manner), which was the affair may happen.'Every minute with Jack Gracia was a chance to be with somebody who did not know me or my problems', It clearly can be seen that the answer is not relevant because there is something hiding.She did not answer strictly or deny the affair.She also explained unnecessary information too much (violated the maxim of quantity).Dr. Lightman needed to reveal the love affair because it might have a relation to the revenge in love affair or not.The whole answers were unnecessary answers.Then, she came up with angry answer, 'You think that I had burn down my own house?',she blamed herself by saying something that was believed to be false (violated the maxim of quantity), so her expectation that Dr. Lightman was wrong about her to think that she had burnt the house.However, she used wrong causality to show that the accusation was completely wrong (violated the maxim of relevance).She dragged a conclusion, which had not been mentioned by Dr. Lightman.Blaming is one of the ways to avoid an accusation.For her, it was not a big deal to answer irrelevant as long as she did not accuse as a suspect.The whole answers do not show that she was the suspect or not, but it can be seen that she hide something to save herself.The woman did two times in the maxim of quality, two times in the maxim quantity, and one time in the maxim of manner.
speaker may hide something.From that TV series, when the characters noticed that they wanted to be looked for about their involvement toward to the case, the characters began to eliminate any chance for the hearer to respond.As a result, the hearer would not ask more questions, and achieve their goals.Nevertheless, when the characters violated a certain number of maxims, it supposes to be easier for the hearer, especially in crime investigation, to identify that those characters have something to be hidden, since they want to build other's belief.In addition, not all the maxims can be violated in the same time because unconsciously, people have tendency only focus on two or three maxims in the same time when they are lying.From the seven excerpts showed that the maxim of manner is rarely to be violated when people are telling lie.It may be easier to violate the maxim of quality, quantity, and relevance because people may not put much attention to their attitude, and more focus on their utterance.
The Cooperative Principle depicts best theory in order to facilitate process of lie.In Lie to Me, as a demonstrated in the study, the characters did multiple violations in every section of investigation.Telling a lie can be a cruel tool at the important situation because it omits major information that is needed.Since the series was based on true characters, the finding is a good capture as the criteria that may happen in the real life.Also, it can be useful for linguistic learner, who is interesting with the Cooperative Principle theory, because language learning should not focus on grammatical competence only, but also communicative competence.
This research only analyzed the utterances in the investigation scenes, hence I suggest that researches in the future who want to analyze the maxims violation may use different scene, but still consists a lie.I hope this analysis can be useful to improve the understanding of the violation of maxims, specifically for lying purposes.In fact, people will be able to see what is behind one's utterance.

Table 1
Setting: Dr. Lightman's office -In the investigation room, a woman and her son were waiting Dr.