A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF IMPLICATURE IN SOCIAL MEDIA COMMENTS ON NEWS POSTS ABOUT DONALD TRUMP

Abstract

When Donald Trump's name was added to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, many Instagram users did not simply say they disapproved. They compared America to North Korea, offered the world's "condolences," and nicknamed the president "Trumpet." This study examines how such indirect expressions work as tools of political criticism. Using a descriptive qualitative design and purposive sampling, it analyzes ten highly engaged comments on an Al Jazeera English Instagram video about the renaming, drawing on Grice's Cooperative Principle and Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory. The comments flouted all four conversational maxims, thirteen times in total. Users flouted Quality through metaphors and geopolitical analogies, Quantity through dismissive understatement, Relevance through hypothetical futures and historical comparisons, and Manner through sarcasm and irony. These flouts are not random emotional outbursts. They are calculated strategies of implicational impoliteness, which allow users to deliver severe moral judgments while avoiding direct confrontation. They depend on shared sociopolitical knowledge and collective cultural memory, especially the contrast between Kennedy's legacy and Trump's perceived self-promotion. The study shows that, on social media, indirect communication functions not only as a linguistic phenomenon but as a sociopolitical mechanism of symbolic resistance, ideological contestation, and democratic dissent.