| dc.description.abstract | Conversational implicatures are ever present and commonly used in our day to day conversations. They are of importance in our conversations and it is almost impossible not to use them when it comes to communication. study is on the use of conversational implicatures in interviews in the Kenyan print media. The study was to find out kinds of answers interviewees prefer to give when responding to 'yes' / 'no' questions. This study makes use of the pragmatic theory of implicature that is based on HP. Grice's (1989 [1967] [1975]) work to lore kinds of responses given and how hearers interpret and arrive at conclusions as to what the words uttered by the speaker mean or what they 'imply'.
The authentic data were taken from two news paper pull-outs, namely: Sunday Nation Magazine and the Friday East African Magazine. The collected data were analyzed using the theory of implicature. The results of the data analysis revealed that interviewees gave more indirect 'yes' / 'no' answers to 'yes' / 'no' questions in the Friday East African Standard. In the Sunday Nation, interviewees gave more direct 'yes' / 'no' answers than indirect 'yes' / 'no' answers to 'yes' / 'no' questions.
This thesis has six chapters. Chapter one gives a summary of the general framework of the study, statement of the problem, the set of objectives, hypotheses, rationale, scope and limitation of the investigation, theoretical framework, literature review and research methodology. More on the theory is done in chapter two. In chapter three, literature related to the topic of the research is discussed. Chapters four and five analyze responses given in interviews in the selected Kenyan print media, against the background of the Gricean theory of implicature; and finally in chapter 5, a summary of the findings and a conclusion are presented. | en_US |
