SPEECH ACTS IN COMMUNICATIVE EVENTS IN
SCHOOL CONTEXTS
A Thesis
Submitted to the English Applied Linguistics Study Program in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Magister Humaniora
By:
LESTARI RUMAHORBO Registration Number : 8136112045
ENGLISH APPLIED LINGUISTICS STUDY PROGRAM
POSGRADUATE SCHOOL
i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Praise is to Jesus Christ, who gives the writer blessing, health, knowledge,
power and opportunity to finish this study. The writer’s deepest gratitude is only
for Him, the Most Gracious and the Most Merciful.
This research could not be completed without a great deal of help of many
people. So in the process of writing this thesis, the writer would like to extend her
sincere and special thanks. Her gratitude is intended for her beloved parents,
BapakAlm. B.Rumahorbo and Mother Alm. N. Situmorang for their endless love,
prays, motivation and their brilliant advice during their lifetimewho make her
never gave up in accomplishing this thesis on time. She is not strong and nothing
without their fabulous encouragement.
Her enormous gratitude and best appreciation are expressed to
Prof.Dr.BerlinSibarani,M.Pd and Dr. Rahmad Husein,M.Ed for his brilliant
advisers, who has spent precious time in giving suggestion, encouragement,
guidance, advices until this thesis comes to its due time.
She also would like to thanks to all lecturers who have given her the
valuable knowledge and science during her study at the English Applied
Linguistics Study Program of Postgraduate School, State University of Medan. In
particular, she addresses her gratitude to Dr. Rahmad Husein,M.Ed, the Head of
English Applied Linguistics Study Program, Dr. Anni Holila Pulungan, M.Hum
the secretary of English Applied Linguistics Study Program. The Administration
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She is also deeply grateful to all her brothers (A.Rumahorbo / M br.
Silalahi, U. Rumahorbo/ M br. Pasaribu, A.Rumahorbo / S. br. Sirait, K.
Rumahorbo/ L. Br. Tobing and her sisters N. Situmorang/ L br. Rumahorbo,
S.Sihombing/ E br. Rumahorbo, H.Purba/ R. Rumahorbo and F.Silalahi/ L. br.
Rumahorbo). Furthermore she would like to express her gratitude to her niece
Corrintya, Chrisantya, Agnes, Yocelin, Elditaand to her bestfriends, Friskayanti,
Marita Sari, Meylin, Vista, Satria, THM groups, LTBI B4 class and friends that
can not mention for sharing ideas and developing her thesis.
Finally, the writer is aware that nothing is perfect as well as this thesis. For
that, any constructive criticism, suggestions, or comments will be highly
appreciated to bring this next to perfection and she hopes this thesis can give a bit
contribution to the language education and will be useful for all.
Medan, 23 December 2016
The Writer,
iii ABSTRACT
Rumahorbo, Lestari.RegistrationNumber : 8136112045.Speech Acts in Communicative Events in School Contexts. Thesis : English Applied Linguistic Program, Postgraduate School, State University of Medan, 2016
This research deals with Speech acts in communicative events in school contexts. The objective of the research were to know how speech acts realized linguistically in communicative events in school contexts. This research conducted qualitative method.The data collected is analyzed by applying interactive model of Miles and Huberman. The location of this research is in SMP Tunas Harapan Mandiri Rantauprapat.Speech acts classify into assertive, directive, commisives, expressive and declarative. The utterances occurred during
the teacher’s meeting were recorded and transcribed, then the speakers were
iv ABSTRAK
Rumahorbo, Lestari. Registration Number : 8136112045.Speech Acts in Communicative Events in School Contexts. Sebuah Thesis : Linguistik Terapan Bahasa Inggris, Universitas Negeri Medan, 2016.
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CHAPTER I : INTRODUCTION ... 1
1.1 The Background of the Study ... 1
1.2 The Problems of the Study ... 7
1.3 The Objective of the Study ... 7
1.4 The Scope of the Study ... 8
1.5 The Significances of the Study ... 8
CHAPTER II : REVIEW OF LITERATURE ... 9
2.1 Pragmatics ... 9
2.2 Speech Acts ... 10
2.2.1 Kinds of Speech Acts...12
2.2.1.1 Locutionary Act. ... 12
2.2.1.2 Illocutionary Act ... 14
2.2.1.3 Perlocutionary Act ... 15
2.2.2 Classification of speech Acts ... 16
2.2.2.1 Assertives ... 16
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2.2.2.3 Commisssives ... 18
2.2.2.4 Expressives ... 19
2.2.2.5 Declaratives ... 20
2.2.3 The Realization of Speech Acts ... 21
2.3 Communicative Events ... 22
2.3.1 School Context ... 24
2.4 Relevant Studies ... 25
2.5 Conceptual Framework ... 28
CHAPTER III : RESEARCH METHOD ... 30
3.1 Research Design ... 30
3.2 The Data and Data Source... 30
3.3 Tehnique of Collecting Data ... 31
3.4 The Tehnique of Data Analysis... 31
3.5 Trustwhortiness ... 34
CHAPTER IV : DATA ANALYSIS, FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION ... 37
4.1 Data Analysis ... 37
4.1.1 The Realization of Direct speech acts ... 48
4.1.1.1 Direct Realization with Declarative ... 48
4.1.1.2 Direct Realization with Imperative... 50
4.1.1.3 Direct Realization with imperative ... 51
4.1.2 The Realization of Indirect speech acts ... 52
4.1.2.1 Indirect Realization with Declarative ... 52
4.1.2.2 Indirect Realization with Interrogative ... 53
4.1.2.3 Indirect Realization with imperative ... 55
4.2 The reason of using Direct and Indirect realization ... 56
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4.4 Discussion ... 64
CHAPTER V : CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION ... 66
5.1 Conclusion ... 66
5.2 Suggestion ... 67
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LIST OF TABLES
TABLE Page
1. Technique of Data Analysis ...31
2. Selecting Data of Direct and Indirect Speech Acts...38
3. Data Analysis of Direct and Indirect Speech Acts...41
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LIST OF APPENDICES
Appendix Page
1. Observation Sheet ...70
2. Transcript of Headmaster’s Utterances...71
3. Transcript of Schoolboard’s Utterances...76
4. Transcript of Teacher and Student’s Utterances...81
5. Transcript of Teacher’s Utterances...88
1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 The Background of the Study
People use language as Communication.Communication is simply the act
of transferring information from one place to another. People use many variations
in communicating in order to share their feelings and ideas such as verbal and
nonverbal communication. According to Buck (2002), there are two types of
communication. Verbal communication and nonverbal communication.Verbal
communication is the use of sounds and words to express yourself. An example of
verbal communication is saying “No” when someone asks you to do something
you don’t want to do.
Nonverbal communication is usually understood as the process of
communication through sending and receiving wordless messages. Such messages
can be communicated through gesture;body language or posture; facial
expression and eye contact. In other words it can be divided into four categories:
aesthetic,physical, signs, and symbols. These two types are the general media of
people to interact each other in which the speech act occurs. Speech act is a kind
of verbal communication and it is a subdivision of pragmatics. According to Yule
(1996), speech act is a study of how the speakers and hearers use language. Bach
(2000) explains that an action in verbal communication has message in itself, so
Speech act is the utterance that occurs and act refers to an action. That is
the reason why people have to interpret the meaning of communication or
language through speech acts. We always perform speech act in our daily life.
Sometimes we don’t realize that the utterances we produce consist of speech act.
We often use utterances with indirect meaning. Speech act occurs on the process
of the meaning in how the communication occurs and how the listener perceives
the aim. In many times, people not only saying but also forcing the hearer to do
something. When the hearer is doing an act, it means that he or she is doing
illocutionary act.
School is a public place to educate students in learning process. As a
public place there are many people at school. Almost all the people who enter the
school communicate to each other. They may use different utterances, such as
declaratives, interrogatives or imperatives. They use sentences according to their
situation.For instance,teachers have different communication while they are
teaching in the classroomand if they communicate to their friends during their
free time.Mostly teachers’ utterances in the classroom are direct speech act while
outside the classroom they tend to use indirect speech act. We may see the
example below:
[ The teacher’s conversation in the classroom]
Teacher : Minggu lalu kita sudah belajar tentang Tata Surya dan planet. Ada yang mengingat ada berapa jenis dari planet-panet.
[ salah satu anak murid yang bernama Yonatalia tunjuk tangan dan menjawab pertanyaan guru ]
Yonatalia : Ada 8 jenis planet bu.
Teacher : Bagus. Berarti Yona belajar dan mengulangi pelajaran dirumah.
Apa saja yang delapan itu.
From the conversation above we may see that teacher use direct speech
act inthe form of interrogative and the function is as questioning. Yona responses
teacher in direct form by saying Ada delapan jenis planet bu. [ Mam, There are 8
kinds of planets]. People don't speak merely to exercise their vocal cords.
Generally, thereason people say what they say when they say it is to
communicatesomething to those they are addressing. That is, in saying something
aperson has a certain intention, and the act of communicating succeedsonly if that
intention is recognized by the hearer. The intention isrecognized partly on the
basis of what is said, but only partly. What issaid does not fully determine what
the speaker is to be taken to bedoing.
Illocutionary act is a very important part of speech act because
illocutionary actitself becomes the main central to linguistics in elements of
communication. Accordingto Levinson (1983:1) defines thatpragmatics is a study
of relation between languages, grammatical and encoded in thestructure of
language. So, generally he says that the terms of pragmatics is said as the branch
of linguistics which concerns with the use of language in social contexts and
theways in which people produce and comprehend meanings through language.
Morris (1983) also defines the definition of pragmatics. He says that pragmatics is
the study of the relationships between linguistics and the users and also discusses
the contextual meaning because pragmatics involve the interpretation of what
people mean in particular context and how the context influence what is said.
The ability to comprehend and produce a communicative act is referred to
about the social status between the speaker involved, cultural knowledge and the
linguistics knowledge. The concept of an illocutionary act is central to the concept
of a speech act. Although there are numerous opinions regarding how to define
'illocutionary acts', there are some kinds of acts which are widely accepted as
illocutionary, for example promising, ordering someone, and commanding.
Illocutionary act has some different types. Yule (1996) has set up the
classification of illocutionary speech act as five subdivisions. They are:
representative, directive, commissive, expressive, and declarative. Each type has
different context and meaning. All of these types will become the media for the
writer to analyze utterances in school communication.
The way of people to communicate are always different.We sometimes
communicate with direct or indirect speech acts. It depends on certain setting
such as in social, science or religion. In social purpose, particularly happened in
school environment people tend to use direct speech act in formal setting and
indirect speech act in informal setting. The utterances used by headmaster to
teachers during the meeting or teachers to students during the learning process
are catagorized as formal utterances and the utterances used by teachers in
different setting such as at the school canteen, security post during their free time
are catagorized as informal setting. For example :
The conversation above is in the school canteen. Irma asks question to get
information about what food are preapared in the canteen is knonw as locutionary.
She also ask question to Rona in order to hear Rona’s response and ready to serve
Irma because Irma is hungry and wants to eat in the canteen is known as
illocutionary. In helping Irma to serve her food and give it to her directly is known
as perlocutionary effect.
Searle (1979) highlights that speech act is presented in real language use
situations. Accordingly, he says that the basic assumption on the speech act theory
should be that the smallest unit in human communication is the implementation of
certain types of acts. AccordingBach(2000), these acts in communication cases
are associated with the functional dimensions of language. As opposed to
morphological, syntactic and rhetorical dimensions regarding organization of the
language structures, pragmatic dimension are associated with producing and
understanding speech acts. These two dimensions function reciprocally in
communication. Speech acts in one form of utterances can be used by the speakers
of interlocutors to convey the meaning of their purposes in communication. In
communication itself, pragmatic competence has an important role. In this way,
the pragmatic competence as the ability to perform speech acts should be
mastered in different types of speech acts.
Pragmatic deals with the speaker’s communicative competence.Speakers
use their knowledge of a language to convey and interpret meanings.In the area of
pragmatics, the speakers interpret their utterance in social contexts, knowing what
knowledge enables them to produce and understand utternaces in relation to
specific communicative purpose and specific speech contexts.
Based on the phenomena above, the researcher is interested ininvestigating
the used of speech acts in communicative events in school context. It is focused
on the participant’s utterances in order to know how they perform acts. As
Leongkamchorn (2011) Speech acts are actions performed via utterances. When
people produce an utterance, they might declare, assert, express, order, promise,
request, complain, apologize, compliment, warn, threaten, refuse, suggest, etc. All
these acts mentioned are in the minds of speakers when they produce the
utterances, and the listeners need to recognize the various acts by interpreting the
meaning conveyed via the utterances. It is the same when we are at school
environment.
Some teachers or students might communicate to others by using
different speech scts.They want to assert their beliefs, express their feeling on
something, persuade and convince the listeners to do something. Speech act
theory nowadays is used widely to study and analyze daily conversation. There is
also some research using speech act theory to analyze statements in other
contexts.In this case, the choice of the speech acts theory as the Linguistic
framework for the analysis of speech acts incommunicative events in school
context based on the fact that the every people perform various actions through
utterances.
As an act of communication, a speech act succeeds if the audience
expressed.Austin (1962) classifies speech acts into, (1) Locutionary acts, (2)
Perlocutionary acts and (3) Illocutionary acts. In this thesis, the form and its
function of speech acts is the main focus investigation, because by knowing the
form and its function, it will make the hearersunderstandthe intended meaning
easily.
There are five function of speech acts, those are assertives,
directives,commissives, declaratives and expressives. This study was investigated
speech act in communicative events in school contexts. The main aspects which
were observed are speech acts used by the schoolboard, headmaster and teachers
in the school environment, how those typesof speech acts are used by participants and the reasons why those types of speech acts used as the ways they are during
the teacher’s meeting or teacher’s conversation.
1.2 The Problem of the Study
Based on the background of the study, the problem of the study as the
following.
1. How are speech acts realized linguisticallyincommunicative events in
school contexts?
2. Why are the speechactsrealized in the way they are?
1.3 The Objectives of the study
1. to describe how those types of speech acts realized incommunicative
events in school context.
2. to explain the reason why those types of speech acts realized in the
waythey are.
1.4 The scope of the Study
The studyinvestigated speech acts used by the participants in school
contexts. The main aspect observed were the form and its function of speech acts
and the way of speech acts used in communicative events in school context. The
data were taken in communicative events in school contexts.The utterances were
analyzed based on the types of speech acts used by school boards, headmaster and
teachers.In this case, it is important to describe and elaborate the speech acts
theory and the realization of linguistic devices in that context so the factors
generating the speech acts can be analyzed.
1.5 The Significance of the Study
The findings of this study are expected to be theoretically and Practically.
Theoretically, the findings of this research will be expected to provide
contribution to the theories of pragmatics and sociolinguistics, especially to the
theory of speech act in specific in communicative events in school context.
Practically, the findings of the study will give the readers a better understanding
of context and speech acts are used in the study of pragmatic. She also hopes it
66
5.1 Conclusion
This study is concerned on speech acts in communicative events in school
contexts. It is aimed at describing how the way of the school board,
headmaster and teacher use speech acts in school contexts. After analyzing the
data, some conclusions can be stated as the following :
1. There are two three kinds of speech acts. Those are locutionary,
illocutionary and perlocutionary. In performing speech acts people can use
two ways of speech acts in communicative events in school contexts, those
are Direct and Indirect speech acts. Direct and Indirect speech acts are
used in the form of declarative, interrogative and imperative.
2. Direct speech acts generally is the syntactic form of the utterance reflects
the direct illocutionary act. Direct realization of declarative form is used
to make a statement, an interrogative form is used to ask a question and in
an imperative form is used to give an order or make a request. The
participants in school contexts tends to use direct act so that they can
clearly understand the speakers’ intention. Indirect realization is assumed
if the syntactic form of an utterance does not reflect any indirect
illocutionary act associated with it or indirect speech acts are performed
5.2 Suggestion
Based on the above conclusions, the following suggestion are given as
follow:
1. It is suggested that other researchers of pragmatics should develop the
theory of speech acts in communicative events in school contexts by
introducing it to the students so that they will be interested to conduct a
research related to the field.
2. The use of speech acts will influence the successful of communication in
school contexts. So, it is suggested to the school board, headmaster and
teachers have to use appropriate speech acts in order that the hearers
understand easily the utterance spoken by the speakers. Further research
need to be conducted in other school context to compare the use of speech
acts used by school board, headmaster and teachers to enrich speech acts
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