Pragmatic Deviation of Grice’s Cooperative Principle in Trump’s Political Interview With the CNN News Channel

Abstract

The present paper aims to investigate pragmatic deviation from Grice’s (1975, 1989) cooperative principle and conversational maxims in the previous United States president, Donald Trump’s political interview with CNN News Channel. The paper follows a qualitative approach in gathering and examining the data. An oral document that was captured from YouTube is followed in the current paper as instrumentation. This document, which is chosen purposefully, is an interview that was broadcast on CNN News Channel between Trump and reporter Cooper in 2016 before the election which Trump won. A discourse analysis method is utilized to study the coded transcript. Findings show that Trump deviates from Grice’s cooperative principle and conversational maxims. Also, the researchers argue that the reasons behind such deviation are (1) hiding the truth that could damage Trump’s image before the audience, (2) trivializing other’s claims to make the audience feel that these claims are silly, (3) refusing to share his own plans with others, (4) withholding his opinion about the US allies so as to keep strong relationships with them, (5) influencing the audience’s thinking about him by distorting the facts, (6) showing himself as the best candidate and should be elected as the US president.