An analysis on the conversations in the bargaining situation based on Grice's maxims

There are many kinds of communication in the society. One of them is bargaining. \nIt is the negotiation between seller and buyer with the hope of an agreement about the price of the thing being sold/bought which takes the form of a compromise or a \nvictory for either the seller or the buyer (Rutherford, 1992:32). \nThe writer chose bargaining in her study because she observed that people still liked to do bargaining although it took time. She wondered why the seller and the \nbuyer took such length of time in bargaining and whether the language they used had something to do with it. Therefore, she analyzed the conversations in the bargaining \nsituation based on Grice's maxims - maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relevance, and maxim of manner. Those maxims are the rules formulated by Grice. A \nspeaker must obey them in order to achieve understandable and successful communication (in Renkema, 1993:9-10). So, in this study the writer wants to find out whether \nthe participants in a bargaining situation adhere to Grice's maxims in their exchanges of communication in order to achieve an agreement. \nThe subjects of this study were people at Atom Shopping Centre who engaged in bargaining in selling/buying things. They were selected on the basis of convenience \n(because of availability). The writer recorded their bargaining secretly and then chose ten conversations which were the clearest ones to be analyzed. In doing the analysis, the writer used qualitative research design because her analysis did not deal with quantitative calculation. \nBesides analyzing the data using maxim of quantity, quality, relevance, and manner, the writer also used maxim of consistency - which is not postulated in Grice’s maxims -not only because it emerged from the data but also because it is important in achieving understandable and successful communication. After analyzing, the writer \nfound out that the sellers and the buyers violated most of Grice's maxims and maxim of consistency. They only adhered to maxim of relevance. However, the violations of \nsome of the maxims (maxim of consistency, maxim of quality, and sometimes maxims of quantity) were necessary because those violations functioned as means to achieve \nthe purposes of the participants in the bargaining situation- the sellers could sell their \ngoods and get as big profits as possible and the buyers could buy the things they wanted with lower prices.