Abstract:
When communicating, people are not only conveying information but also constituting
desires to maintain a good relationship between the interlocutors. However, in day-to-day
life, people sometime say something and mean directly or indirectly something else This
study explores the violation of Gricean maxims by male and female politicians in selected
Pakistani political talk shows. The aim of this research was to investigate the reasons
behind the violation of all four Gricean maxims by the male and female politicians the
selected talk shows and to find the frequency of violations of maxims especially to explore
the most and least violated maxims by both male and female politicians. The descriptive
qualitative methodology has been employed by the researcher to analyse the collected data
which was in the form of the transcription of the selected episodes of three selected talk
show; Off the Record with Kashif Abbasi, 11th Hour and Nadeem Malik Live, which were
translated by the researcher from Urdu into English language. The findings revealed that
both male and female politicians violated Gricean maxims, hence, both the genders
violated the maxim of relevance the most but the female politicians violated it more with
the percentage of 60% while it was violated 40% among all the maxims by male politicians.
The least violated maxim was also similar i.e., maxim of quantity by both the genders. The
analysis revealed that the reasons of the violations of the maxims involves the motives such
as gaining the support of people, hiding the truth for face-saving, irrelevant discussions and
obscure responses by evading the questions.
