The study of violating Grice's Maxims in comments of celebrities' web pages

Discourse analysis is a new, and quite interesting, branch of linguistics that deals mainly with the analysis of language interactions. Among different topics discussed in discourse analysis, Grice’s four maxims form an important topic especially when it comes to analyzing linguistic interactions of various types. Each maxim (quality, quantity, relation and manner) has its own meaning. An important point is that violation of these maxims can lead at times to a change in meaning or intention of the user. Using the Grice’s maxims theory, the present study intends to study interactions that occurred among Iranian users of a social network on latest celebrity news. The analysis of the data revealed that violation of the maxim of quantity in this social media by social media users on celebrities’ web pages was intentional. In other words, the users violated this maxim especially when they wanted to degrade , disgrace and dishonor the celebrities.