Speech acts used by the main characters in Crash Movie

ABSTRACT

As the means of communication, language has the most important role for the people interaction. In saying something, one generally intends more than just to communicate. In other words, behind the speakers utterance speakers have been acted an action. It means that speaking a language is performing an action such as stating, asking, warning, advising and etc. speech acts are acts of the communication. Speech acts are also considered to say or do something. An utterance has three types of acts. Locutionary act is the utterance itself which has meaning, illocutionary act is the speakers meaning behind what he utters and the last is perlocutionary act as the effect of speaker intention to hearer. Furthermore, speech acts also could be found in the conversations produced by the characters. Even, basically the utterance which is used in the movie is not natural. So, the ‘Crash’ movie is selected which reflected the complicated social phenomena. The language mostly used is reflected the racial discrimination of language use between the white and the black.

The research attempts to investigate the phenomena of the speech acts in the utterance produced by the characters of ‘Crash’ movie. The research question is how are speech acts used by the main characters in Crash movie. To provide descriptive knowledge how speech acts are used by the main characters in Crash movie.

The descriptive qualitative research is as the design to describe the speech acts because the data are in the form words rather than number. The data were taken from the utterances which used by the main characters in Crash movie. In data analysis the researcher began with finding the context of each data which is consisting of one scene. Then, the data were analyzed partially using felicity conditions first to determine whether the utterances were felicitous or not. Then, the data were discussed into speech acts based on the Austin.

After analyzing the data, it is found speech acts used by the main characters. The mostly illocutionary acts found in utterances used by the main characters in ‘Crash’ movie is ordering and stating. It is followed by asking, warning, thanking, permission and advising. The verdictive illocutionary acts is not found because the conversation was not happened in the court.

Finally, researcher expects that this research will be able to help the next researchers who are conduct in the same field of study. Researcher expects that somebody who will conduct in the same study will be able to manage other objects, such as utterances used by the jury which is most of the verdictives illocutionary act or in other objects of literary work.