Open AccessTelling People to Change Their Behaviour Through Implications: An Implicature Analysis on Covid-19 Public Service Announcements in Indonesia
Author(s) -
Susan Marbun,
Dumaris E. Silalahi,
Herman Herman
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
elsya
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2684-9224
pISSN - 2684-7620
DOI - 10.31849/elsya.v3i3.6336
Subject(s) - implicature , context (archaeology) , grice , psychology , political science , public relations , linguistics , pragmatics , history , archaeology , philosophy
Public service announcements (PSAs) are the official way for governments to inform, educate and change public behaviour in order to reduce public health issues, such as Covid-19. This study aims to analyse the types of implicatures in the Covid-19 PSAs published by the Ministry of Health Republic of Indonesia in their Instagram account, @kemenkes_ri, in order to fill the research gap on implicature studies in a public health and political contexts. This qualitative descriptive research analysed a data of eleven Covid-19 PSAs which were published from March 2020 to January 2021 according to Grice’s implicature theory. The researchers discovered that PSAs employed conversational implicatures more frequently than conventional implicatures (18%) to deliver their messages, with generalised conversational implicature being more prevalent (64%) than particularised conversational implicature (18%). Conventional implicature was used only in earlier posts when Covid-19 has not been a common knowledge among the public, and once people are already used to the “new normal”, alter PSAs used conversational implicature because the public already have the context of Covid-19. Results of this study illuminated the differences between each type of implicatures and also contributed to the lack of studies of PSAs’ implied meanings, the dearth of implicature studies in a non-classroom context.