Journal of African Studies and Sustainable Development

Social media will always be violated and flouted during conversations. Hence, the title of this work: Flouting implicature in language use of social media users: a study of Facebook and WhatsApp Chats. This flouting comes up once there is communication gap in the conversations. The data of this article were sieved from the chats of language users on Facebook and WhatsApp. These data were analysed using Grice’s cooperative principle, direct observation of the users considering that the research employed the theory of ethnomethodology of communication. Descriptive analysis was used to analyse the language use of users in those selected social media. The study finds that there is flouting implicature in language use by the users, resulting in an unintended misinformation as the readers are unable to guess the exact intentions of the writer. Some posts on these spheres lack truthfulness in them. There is tendency of not being perspicuous in the posts. The work concluded that managing the language in it goes a long way in making the conversation more understandable. It also solved the situation of flouting during interactions.

Open Full Text (PDF)