Speech acts used by the main character in “Wild Child” movie

ABSTRACT

In saying something, one generally intends more than just to communicate. In other words, behind the speaker‟s utterance, they have acted an action. It means that they can do anything through utterances such as requesting, commanding, asserting apologizing, thanking, and et cetera. To express the idea, people do not only produce utterances consisting grammatical structure, but they also do an action via their utterances. Speech acts are an act of communication which is considered as saying or doing something. Speech acts are used to analyze language phenomena. It could be found in utterances of movie. Hence, the researcher chooses “Wild Child‟ movie as an object of the research. The language used by the main character reflects social phenomena when she was angry, happy, sad or annoyed.

This research attempts to investigate the phenomena of speech acts used by the main character of “Wild Child” movie. The research questions are: what are the types of Speech Acts used by the main character in “Wild Child” movie? and How are the Speech Acts used by the main character in “Wild Child” movie?. Moreover, this research is to investigate the types of speech acts used by main character, and to provide descriptive knowledge how speech acts are used by main character in “Wild Child” movie.

The descriptive qualitative method is used to conduct this research. It is done to describe and explain speech acts used by the main character of „Wild Child‟ movie. The data were taken from utterances used by the main character of “Wild Child” movie. To analyze the data the context of each utterance and felicity conditions are determined to know whether they are fulfilled or not. Then the data were presented and analyzed by using speech act theory proposed by Austin namely: locutionary acts, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act.

After analyzing the data, it is found that mostly speech acts used by the main character in „Wild Child‟ movie are expositives illocutionary acts, such as reminding, stating, protesting, and et cetera. Then, followed by exercitives, behavitives, and commissives. The Verdictive illocutionary act is not found in this research because the main character never has judgment about hearer‟s action.

Finally, she expects this research will be able to help the next researcher who conducts the research in the same field. It is suggested to further researchers to be able to investigate other objects which might contains verdictive illocutionary act. Hence he or she can contribute new findings about speech acts for the sake of enriching discourse studies.