Constative and performative utterances in Obama’s dialogues

ABSTRACT

By taking account Austin’s theory, this research focuses on analyzing the constative and performative utterances in Obama’s dialogues. Constative is any utterance that asserts something about a fact or states of affairs and are adjudged to be true or false. Meanwhile, performative is utterance that performs an action in saying of it or an utterance that is used to do something (Renkema, 1993).

The purpose of this research is to get understanding and detailed explanation about constative and performative utterances used in Obama’s dialogues. This research gives deep information about constative and performatives, helps the speaker or the listener in understanding whether the speaker only says something about reality or he does something with his utterances.

This research is a descriptive qualitative. The data are in the forms of utterances produced by president Obama in his dialogues done on 3rd, 17th February, and 20th March 2009. The data are analyzed, firstly, finding the context, and then classifying the utterances into constatives or performatives. Then, the performative utterances are examined using felicity conditions and then performatives are considered as happy and unhappy performatives. Further, the performative utterances are determined whether it is explicit or implicit performative. Finally, the performative utterances are classified based on performative types namely verdictives, exercitivies, commisives, behabitives and expositives.

The data analysis revealed some findings covering the formulated research question. It is found that the speaker uses contatives by producing the utterances that are used to say about the reality in the world. Meanwhile, the speaker uses performatives by producing the utterances to perform an action. These performatives fulfill the felicity conditions proposed by Austin, so that these performatives are felicitous (happy) and successful communicate the messages. In addition, the speaker uses both explicit and implicit performatives in his utterances. Furthermore, there are four types of performatives found in Obama’s dialogues, namely exercitives, commisives, behabitives and expositives. However, verdictive performative is not found in this analysis because the speaker does not make assessment and judgment at all in his utterances.

Based on the findings mentioned above, it is suggested to the next researchers to fill the gap on analyzing verdictive acts in the court or official conversations by using Searle’s theory or Ibrahim and Harnish’s theory to make improvement in analyzing the data.