Abstract :
For a leader, speeches are the means to present his ideas. Some of these ideas may become national policy. To be able to access the speaker’s ideas, the hearer should understand the true meaning of the speech. This study explores the ideas of Tunku Abdul Rahman through implicit utterances used in public speeches. This study uses corpus data. The research focuses on utterances containing implicit elements (figurative language) for meaning. This study uses the pragmatic approach that applies the relevance theory (TR) of Sperber and Wilson (1986&1995). This theory emphasizes the cognitive role, involving context, context effects (cognitive) and processing efforts. The study found that Tunku used implicit utterances to convey his socio-political ideas, in particular about colonization and independence.
