Illocutionary acts used by mentally retarded students in Yayasan Darul Ulum Jombang

ABSTRACT

in communication, people use language to express their feelings, ideas, thought and purpose. In addition, the speaker does not only do something (0 himself, he also requires something from the listener (Chaika, 1982:70). It can be in the form of an offer, command, question and slatemenl. Renkema (1999:11) states that there are relationship between form and function in verbal communication. People perform indirect act and the respond or listener can either direct act or indirect act, and the action includes illocutionary act.

The present study is conducted to find out the kinds of illocutionary acts and felicity conditions which are used by mentally retarded students in Yayasan Darul Ulum Jombang. The illocutionary acts are analyzed by using Austin's theory and the felicity condition follows Searle’s theory. The writer chooses this area and only on the male because of their different level of productivity and activeness in producing the utterance that are better than the females. Beside their acts are unique. In addition, they have their 0١vn intonation and gesture when making communication with other.

The descriptive qualitative research is the design of this study. The data are collected in the form of the words, phrases, sentences and the utterances of mentally retarded students, in which the data are conducted from their natural conversation. To achieve this purpose, the research used descriptive because it described the kinds and the function of illocutionary' act and felicity condition. As the result, the study indicated that the illocutionary act and felicity condition, which are used by mentally re.arded students such as assertive, directive, commisive, and representative act expressive. Declarative was rarely used. Directive act was performed in ordering and requesting. The utterances that were used by mentally retarded students were the representative acts, in addition, the representative act was mostly performed in asserting, and commisive act was performed in offering act.

Finally, the researcher suggests that further researcher will understand deeply about mentally retarded language to conduct their study on the other areas of research such as to analyze on their speech act by using other theories which are relevant to the actual phenomena, it also suggests to relate the speech act study with other linguistic studies. However, it will be challenging to study other components of illocutionary acts that are related to other linguistics principles such as psycholinguistic study.