Speech Acts Analysis used by the main characters in “A Walk To Remember” movie

ABSTRACT

People perform their action when they are saying a word. Speech act as the branch of Linguistics analyzes about the performance of an utterance. It plays an important role in human’s interaction because when people say something, they do not only deliver the meaning of the utterance but also the intended meaning beyond it. The researcher is interested in analyzing speech acts on movie because movie presents complete forms of speech acts. She chooses movie “A Walk to Remember” as the research object. This research uses Searle’s speech acts theory to investigate and to describe the speech acts used by the main characters.

This research attempts to investigate the phenomena of speech acts used by the main characters of “A Walk to Remember” movie. It investigates the types of speech acts used by the main characters, identifies the functions of speech acts and describes how the speech acts are performed by the main characters of the movie. Since the research question are determined in this research.

The researcher identifies the speech act utterances of the conversation used by the main characters to analyze the three levels of speech act and the felicity conditions. The descriptive qualitative method was used to conduct this research. It is used to describe and explain the speech acts used by the main characters. The data were taken from the utterances of the main characters. Context of each utterance and felicity conditions are determined to analyze the data. Context and felicity conditions are provided to know whether they are fulfilled or not. Then the data were analyzed by using speech acts proposed by Searle (1969), namely utterance act, propositional act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act.

The result shows that most of the utterances of speech acts used by the main characters in “A Walk to Remember” movie are commissives, directives, representatives, expressive and verdictives. The most dominant speech acts used by the main characters is directive. Declaratives are not found in this movie because the speaker does not have a special institutional rule. The function of the illocutionary act is competitive. Moreover, the speaker performs speech acts in direct and indirect.

Finally, the researcher suggests to the next researchers to analyze the speech act concerning with the utterance act, propositional act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. Moreover, they can also analyze other objects which might contain declaratives illocutionary act.