SOCIAL DOMINANCE THROUGH FLOUTING OF MANNER MAXIM IN OSCAR WILDE'S A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31851/thsrx931Keywords:
Grice’s Maxim, Flouting, Social Dominance, Pragmatics, Oscar WildeAbstract
This study examines how Lord Illingworth in Wilde (1908) systematically flouts Grice's manner maxim to assert social dominance through four linguistic devices: metaphor, ambiguity, paradox/epigram, and prolixity. Using a descriptive qualitative approach grounded in Grice's (1975) Cooperative Principle, fourteen of Lord Illingworth's utterances are selected from the play's primary text and analyzed against the four sub-maxims of manner: avoid obscurity, avoid ambiguity, be brief, and be orderly. The findings reveal that metaphor excludes and hierarchizes listeners; deliberate ambiguity forges alliances and delivers unchallengeable insults; paradox and epigram compress public wit and private threat into a single polished line; and prolixity suppresses interlocutors and evades moral accountability through verbal excess. These findings apply to literary pragmatics, discourse analysis, Victorian studies, drama criticism, sociolinguistics, political rhetoric, and the teaching of critical language awareness in higher education. This study advances existing knowledge as the first systematic analysis of Lord Illingworth's speech through the specific lens of manner-maxim flouting as a mechanism of social dominance, demonstrating that the manner maxim, frequently overlooked in pragmatic literary studies, functions as a precise and purposeful instrument of power in Victorian dramatic discourse.
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