A Pragmatic study on speech acts used in Pasirian-Lumajang

ABSTRACT

The study of language in a society relates to the utterances the people use in their daily interaction. The utterances spoken contain meaning and constitute act within that is called speech act. The speech act is focused on the illocutionary act uttered by the speaker, and the speaker may have more than one language ability that is named bilingual.

This research concerns with the kind of speech act used by the bilingual society, the function on uttering such acts and the form of the uttered acts. The kind of speech act is analyzed to Bach and Hamish category division of speech acts. The function of speech act follows Leech’s four functions of speech act on the social purposes. In addition, the direct and indirect speech act is on Searle theory.

The qualitative descriptive research is as the design of this study. The data are collected from the utterances of bilingual vegetable sellers and the buyers in the traditional market, Pasirian-Lumajang, and they are analyzed inductively from the participant observation done by the researcher herself.

As the result, the researcher finds that the bilingual people uttered three kinds of acts such as constative on 19 illocutionary acts, directive on 6 illocutionary acts, and 2 commisive acts. However, the people do not use the fourth kind, acknowledgement acts. It indicates that the bilingual people in the market are reluctant to express their feeling. On the function of speech acts used, the researcher found the people purpose their act mostly in the competitive function on 23 illocutionary acts, then the collaborative function on 19 illocutionary acts, and the convivial fiinction on 3 illocutionary acts, as well as in conflictive function on 1 (one) illocutionary act. Lastly, the speech acts are usually used directly rather than indirectly, since that the direct speech act occurs on 28 acts and indirect speech act on 18 acts.

Finally, the researcher suggests to the further researchers to analyze deeply on the theory of speech act and choose the theory that is relevant to the nowadays-actual phenomena, and also to relate the speech act study to other linguistic study.