A. RELATED THEORIES 1. Speech Acts
3. Classification of Speech Acts
According to George Yule, Brown and Levinson, and also Searle classified speech acts into five categories: declaration, representative, expressive, directive, and commissive52.
a. Declaration
A declaration is a type of speech act in which the speaker alters the world or situation through their words53. It is carried out with a specific purpose or context,
51Karien, “The Politeness Strategy of Directive Illocutionary Acts By Oprah Winfrey In The Oprah Winfrey Show,” 10.
52Stephen C. Levinson, Pragmatics, Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics (Great Britain: Press Syndicate of The University of Cambridge, 1983), 240.
and the speaker plays a special role in order to make a declaration that is appropriate for the listener. The speaker's words change the situation when he or she makes a statement. Examine the illustration bellows.
1. Priest: I now pronounce you husband and wife.
The priest declares the new status of a man and a woman as husband and wife in this circumstance. Both of the brides' statuses are altered by the priest.
2. Referee: It is offside!
In this case, the referee decides the player and ball possision is offside, so he asked the player to stop the game in a minute.
b. Representative
A representative is a form of speech that conveys the speaker's belief in order to determine whether or not something is true and to confirm that a proposition is true.
Statement, assertion, conclusion, and description are representative speech acts that are categorized according to their roles. For example the utterance proposed in the utterance bellow:
“The earth is flat.”54
This mean that the person conveys his belief of the theory of earth was flat or he/she just give his or her opinion about the specific condition of the earth or give an assertions. The other examples of representative speech acts as follows.
1. It was a cold sunny day.
The speaker hopes that the audience will accept his assertion that it was a sunny, warm day.
53Yule, Pragmatics, 53.
54Yule, 53.
2. Chomsky didn’t write about peanuts.
The speaker conveys his belief that Chomsky didn’t write about peanuts and he expects the listeners accept his belief.
Some verbs with speech acts can be used to indicate a representative speech act, such as: recollect, inform, insist, assure, agree, assert, deny, correct, state, guess, predict, report, describe, and conclude55.
c. Expressive
Expressions that convey the speaker's emotions are referred to as expressive. It conveys psychological states of speaker about something through the expressive utterances56. When he apologizes, joy, sorrow, pain, pleasure, thanks, congratulates, welcomes, or deplores, it means that the speaker is expressing how happy or sad he is about something and is. For example, “congratulation!”57 means that the speaker congratulates someone on her achievements or something good happens to her as a blessings. In conclusion, expressive words are those that, on occasion, convey the speaker's emotions.
d. Directive
A directive is either an utterance that the speaker uses to get someone to do something or a type of speech act that tries to get the listener to do something.
When a directive is used, the speaker tries to get the listener to hear the words (see the illustration in table 2.1). It can come in the form of a command, a request, a plea, a suggestion, or a question. For instance, as stated in the following sentence,
“Could you lend me a pen, please?”58
55Agus Hidayat, “Speech Acts: Force behind Words,” English Education: Jurnal Tadris Bahasa Inggris 9, no. 1 (2016): 5.
56Yule, Pragmatics, 54.
57Yule, 53.
58Yule, 54.
In the preceding example, the speaker's utterance suggests that the listener is asked to do something, such as lend the speaker a pen, so there is a required action of lending the pen.
e. Commissive
A speech action known as "commissive" is one in which the speaker expresses what they intend to do or plan to do in the future or simply commits to a particular course of action59. It include promise, threat, refusal, or pledges acts. For example,
“I will be back.”60 Through this utterance the speaker tried to commits himself that he will be right back. The speaker's use of commissives indicates an effort to convey their message to the audience by attaempting to make hearer’s world fit his words (his wants) as well61. The relationship between the use of language and the five general functions of speech acts, along with their key characteristics, is depicted in the following table62.
Table 2.1 Searle’s five general function of speech acts
Speech acts type
Direction of fit
S= Speaker, X= Situation Declarations Make words change the world S causes X
Representatives Make words fit the world S believes X Expressive Make words fit the world S feels X
Directives Make the world fit words S wants X Commissives Make the world fit words S intends X
The study's conclusion is based on the above discussion: Searle and George Yule's speech acts all share the same characteristics which correlates with each
59Hidayat, “Speech Acts,” 6.
60Fereshteha Theresa, “Politeness Strategies in Directive Speech Act By Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama in ‘Super Soul Sunday’ Talk Show” (Sanata Dharma University, 2020), 11.
61Yule, Pragmatics, 54.
62 Yule, 55.
other and it is requires something different of the listener. The listener is required to pay attention to the speaker's beliefs in representatives. The recipient of a directive is required to decide on a course of action and carry it out. In contrast, commissives, expressions, and declarations require the listener to note new information, such as the speaker's intended course of action, feelings about a fact, or the change in the object's formal status.
In conclusion, speech act is part of social actions. Therefore, speech acts cannot be performed without considering politeness into the utterance that speaker used to deliver his intention. In order to keep good relationships politeness must be applied in communication since politeness links the language use and the social context63. However, the focus of this study will be on the discussion about the directive speech act that all of the characters performed in Alice Oseman's novel I Was Born For This.