The Study of Conversational Implicatures from the Main Characters in Good Will Hunting Movie

This study is aimed at researching conversational implicature in the movie Good Will Hunting, which showcase the implied meanings in the dialogue between the main characters namely, Will Hunting, Sean Maguire, Skylar, Chuckie Sullivan, and Professor Lambeau. The main purpose of this study is to identify the type of implicature from the main characters utterances as well as the implied meaning. This study uses a qualitative descriptive approach. this approach provides flexibility needed to deeply examine the conversations done by the main characters as they are context-dependent and linked to a specific relationship between the main characters. A descriptive study using textual analysis was applied to analyze the conversations of the main characters through the entire of the movie Good Will Hunting. The data were collected by watching the movie and analyzing the utterances of the main characters, using the movie script as an instrument to help the researcher in gaining the data. The utterances were then analyzed by identifying the types of conversational implicature using Grice’s framework. The analysis was continued by identifying the implied meaning of the utterances by looking closely at the relationships of the interlocutors and the specific context and of the conversations. This study reveals that both particularized conversational implicature (PCI) and generalized conversational implicature (GCI) are found in the main characters utterances. From the total of 32 data points collected, the findings show that PCI is dominant than GCI. The frequency of PCI demonstrates that the main characters depended heavily on context, it can be either the relationship of the characters, or the context of the conversation that already known.