A Pragmatic study on Speech Acts used in Advertisements on Private Televisions

ABSTRACT

Advertisement is an effort to persuade or to convince the various levels of people’s images and behaviors in order to do what the advertiser intended. It is one of ways to promote or introduce a product to be familiar with consumer. The activity of advertising will succeed if the advertisement is performed by using right utterances, diction, or styles. When the advertiser utters the utterance, automatically, hc/shc intends to ask consumer to do what is purposed. It means he/she has a certain act intended to be performed especially by the receiver of the advertisement. The advertiser should know the viewers’ ages and social classes to communicate with them effectively. It needs special method and technique to deliver a message. However, the speech act performed by the advertiser primarily on television should consider those mentioned factors in order to be successful in presenting the advertisement and to avoid misunderstanding in accepting the message between what is intended by the advertiser and is reached by the consumer.

The purposes of the study were to find out the types of speech act, ways of speech act performance, characteristics of speech act, and persuasive language on speech act used in advertisement on private television especially in Indonesia.

As the research methodology used in this thesis entitled ، A Pragmatic Study on Speech acts used in Advertisement on Private Television ، was descriptive qualitative research. ٦٦o obtain the manageable and systematic data, the direct observation supported by using recording became the main instrument and the interview was as the secondary instrument to collect the data which were taken from the advertisements on private television in Indonesia. The writer himself became the key instrument of this study. In order to get the valid results of the data, the writer also used the method of triangulation, and especially combined level triangulation. Then, the collected data were analyzed to investigate and to see the results of the research problems stated.

After analyzing and discussing the data, the writer found the following results. Firstly, the utterance acts performed had the illocutionary act of stating, asserting, telling, ordering, asking, or responding and had the perlocutionary act of persuading or convincing. Secondly, the speech acts of the advertisement were performed literally, non-literally, directly, or indirectly. So that, the speech acts performed were (1) literal speech act, (2) non-literal speech act, (3) direct speech act, (4) indirect speech act. Thirdly, the speech acts of the advertisement have some certajn characteristics. They were; the utterance acts constitute act of i I locution and perlocution, the illocutionary acts use the utterances that were mostly used in daily communication and has the feature that its speaker performed it by using the illocutionary intention like intention to tell, state, order, respond, or ask, and the perlocutionary acts are performed implicitly and were the effect of the utterance and illocutionary act performed on the thoughts or actions of the consumer. Fourthly* the speech acts used in the advertisement on Indonesian private television involve the persuasive language. It has fulfilled the requirements of persuasion fundamentals in presenting the language or utterance.

Based on the findings, several suggestions are proposed for further researcher who intends to investigate speech act from another perspective such as from the other semiotic aspects involving syntactic or semantic one. A further researcher can also conduct the study of speech act on another media like radio, Internet, or else. In addition, the results of the study can be used by copywriter of advertisement especially advertisement on television media that making advertisement is not simple but must pay attention the target, way of performance, language or utterance used, and other.