An analysis of speech acts found in Barack Obama’s speech in University of Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Basically, people produce an utterance as an action. It means that they can do anything through utterances such as requesting, commanding, asserting apologizing, thanking, and so on. To express the idea, people do not only produce utterances consisting grammatical structure, but also they do an action via their utterances. Speech acts is a field of linguistics which analyzes language phenomena and even can be found in the speech. Hence, the researcher investigates Barack Obama’s speech when he was in University of Indonesia, November 10th, 2010 as the object.

Based on the Austin theory, an utterance has three types of acts, that is, locutionary act which indicates that the utterance itself has meaning, illocutionary act which is the speaker’s meaning behind what is uttered, and the last is perlocutionary act which is the effect of speaker’s intention to hearers. In addition, this research attempts to investigate and descibe the phenomena of speech acts used by Barack Obama in University of Indonesia. The research questions are how speech acts used by Obama and the functions of every utterance.

The descriptive qualitative method is used to conduct this research. This research describes and explains speech acts used by Barack Obama in speech. The data is taken from the transcript of Obama’s speech in University of Indonesia, November 10th 2010. In analyzing the data, the context of each utterances and felicity conditions are determined to understand whether they are fulfilled or not.

Based on the findings, speech acts used by Barack Obama can be described as follows: first, the researcher does not find declarative one. As well as conflictive which is one of the function of speech act (illocutionary act), declarative is not found because the context of the utterances being conducted by Barack Obama in University of Indonesia is not to bring about the change in the world even though the purpose of the speech is in the opposite.

In addition, the utterances of Obama are mostly in the form of assertive (representative) which means committing the speaker to the truth of expressed proposition. The following ranks belong to directive, expressive, and then commisive because there is nothing for declarative. At the same time, the functions of the utterances mostly belong to collaborative. While the following positions belong to competitive, and then convivial.

Finally, it is suggested to further researchers to analyze such conversations or dialogs in terms of investigating speech act theory. However, there are numerous fields in pragmatics, such as politeness strategies, implicature, deixis, and so on.At the same time, the next researchers should not be trapped into speech act theory while they want to investigate pragmatics.