Conversational implicature and characterisation in Reginald Rose's Twelve Angry Men 1

Abstract

This article studies characterisation in Reginald Rose's three-act play, Twelve Angry Men (1955) in terms of Grice's theory of conversational implicature. It shows that characters' personalities and ideologies can be seen in their violations of particular conversational maxims, the motivations for such violations, and the implicatures thus produced. Although there is no one-to-one relationship between a type of implicature and a personality trait, looking at implicature in context enables literary critics and stylisticians to study how characters are portrayed and how the theme of the work is brought out.