Grice’s Maxims in the Final Round of 2022 South-East Asian Sales Competition

SEASAC attempts to implement competition in a sales training program.The use of English in the tournament can be challenging for speakers of English as a foreign language, especially in the opening, negotiating, handling complaints, and closing a deal, due to implicature.Therefore, a study in the field of linguistics can provide a meaningful insight.The purpose of this study is to examine how conversational implicature, based on Grice's maxims, were constructed.This research adopted a descriptive qualitative approach.The data were obtained from audio transcripts of the recorded final round.The data went through data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing/verification. Several members of the research team conducted the coding process based on the relevant maxims.The results indicate that the sellers conveyed more implicature than the buyer to induce certain emotional states.This study confirms the results of the previous studies on the use of vague language during negotiation.