The political interview program conducted in English by Indonesian political experts on television is new in Indonesia. TVRI II has broadcast the program regularly for quite a while, and it is followed by other private TV stations, particularly since the riots in 1998 when the students toppled Soeharto as the President of the Republic of Indonesia. Since then, politics has not been a taboo topic to be discussed by Indonesians in the printed media as well as in the electronic media. Furthermore, other countries have become interested to know more about the country and its issues. However, the English language, used by the Indonesian political experts, has never been researched. With a view to help to fill the gap, this study aims (1) at discovering the extent to which the Gricean four maxims are observed or not observed by the interview participants, and (2) at finding out the frequency of the use of the maxims.
The data extracted from the video recordings of the interviews are aired by TVRI II from October 2001 to June 2003. Each of the interviews is about fifteen minutes, and the interviews are selected randomly. The interviewees are political observers and political experts. The ten recordings are transformed into transcriptions which are used to analyze the interaction. Each of the interaction of each interview firstly is analyzed based on the basis of the observance and the non-observance of the four maxims. Secondly, it is analyzed by the scoring system of Quartiles 1 - 4 in percentages (%). On the basis of the quartiles most frequent and the least frequent of the observance and the non-observance instances of the maxims are identified.
In conclusion, the results of the analysis and the findings show that 90% of the interviews are observed all of the maxims. By contrast, only in approximately 10% of the interviews, the maxims are not observed. The most frequent instances of the observance of the maxims and the least frequent instances of the observance of the maxims are found with respect to the maxim of relation, which seems to indicate that Indonesian interviewees tend to give relevant answers. Moreover, the result shows that the interviewees follow one of the characteristics of political interview, namely Grice's co-operative principle. |