Elsya (Aug 2021)

Telling People to Change Their Behaviour Through Implications: An Implicature Analysis on Covid-19 Public Service Announcements in Indonesia

  • Susan Marbun,
  • Dumaris E. Silalahi,
  • Herman Herman

DOI
https://doi.org/10.31849/elsya.v3i3.6336
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 3, no. 3
pp. 215 – 224

Abstract

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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.

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