CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Pragmatics
2.1.1 Definition of Pragmatics
The branch of linguistics that is most concerned with meaning is pragmatics, according to Levinson (1983), who was quoted by Farah in 2019. According to his theory, pragmatics is the study of the interactions between language and context that are based on linguistic structure. According to Silalahi in 2016, citing Crystal (1997), pragmatics is the study of language from the perspective of users, particularly with regard to the decisions they make, the limitations they face when using language in social interaction, and the effects their use of language has on other participants in the act of communication. The speaker may make an utterance, which the hearer will then interpret. The interpretation takes into account the specific circumstances, which also had an impact on the hearer's most recent action. To produce the hearer's excellent perception and a good communication outcome, the speaker must take into account what to say, what the situation is, and how to say it. Additionally, miscommunication between the speaker and the listener must be prevented. The issue of point of view can be resolved between the speaker and the listener using pragmatics.
According to Leech (1983:36), pragmatics entails resolving issues from the perspectives of the speaker and the audience. The challenge of the speaker's point of view is how to design a sentence that will produce the desired effect. The most comprehensive definition is from Yule (1996: 3). He claims that the study of speaker meaning is known as pragmatics. The second definition of pragmatic is the study of contextual meaning. The third definition of pragmatics is the study of how less is actually spoken and more is actually communicated. The final definition is that pragmatics is the study of relative distance expression. In order to comprehend pragmatics briefly, according to Yule, one must connect it to other branches of linguistics. This subject can be related to semantics and syntax.
The study of meaning through pragmatics (Paltridge, 2012; Yan Huang, 2014). According to Paltridge (2012), pragmatics is the study of meaning in connection to the social, textual, and background knowledge contexts in which people talk and write.
Background knowledge context refers to what individuals know about one another. Yan Huang (2014), on the other hand, claims that pragmatics is a systematic study of meaning that results from, or is based on, the use of language. He added that implicature,
presupposition, speech act, deixis, and reference are among the main areas of investigation. According to Yule (1996), there are six principles or scopes of pragmatics:
deixis, presupposition, the cooperative principle, implicature, speech acts, and politeness.
Thus, the study of pragmatics is the aim of a speaker (or writer) to convey a message through words, phrases, or sentences. On the other hand, by reasoning backward from the utterance's form, the listeners then try to deduce the speaker's intended communicative purpose (Goodman & Frank, 2016). Consequently, the communication goal has had an impact.
2.1.2 Parts of Pragmatics
This section addresses a few pertinent theories that are connected to the study of pragmatics. Four crucial components of pragmatics are given in this debate. Context, utterance, sentence, and speech event are those.
1) Context
The term "context" refers to a variety of elements that help reconstruct the meaning that a speaker in a communicative engagement intended. Unfortunately, such a definition runs the risk of being worthless since it is too general and lacks a clear pragmatic perspective, particularly when it comes to the role that context plays in reconstructing a speaker's meaning (Bosco, 2004). In other words, contexts are crucial to comprehending and interpreting an utterance since, in a conversation, the goal is not merely to comprehend the word or words that the speaker used, but also to understand the meaning of the sentence. Context influences meaning; when the context changes, so do the meanings. Context aids in understanding elements in making and interpreting speech oriented in users.
Furthermore, context is not just the words said before them or details about the local physical environment, according to Yi-Hua (2011). Instead, it evolved into a wide range of concepts known as specific contextual potentials, or contexts for short. These concepts include co-texts, expectations, religious beliefs, social status, general cultural presumptions, the physical environment, etc., and can include practically any phenomenon imaginable by the human mind. No circumstance exists in which a pragmatic study cannot be characterized as such since the study's pragmatic environment must be present. Horn and Ward (2004:452) state. Who speaks, when, where, to whom, and other factors that only cover a small portion of the entire scenario of utterance make up the narrow of context. In order to determine
the meaning of an utterance, the hearer must first understand the context of the utterance, which is the information needed to give the utterance meaning.
Understanding the context allows the hearer to comprehend an utterance's concepts without misunderstanding the speaker.
2) Utterance
A reference to Crowther's statement that "an utterance is something that someone says" can be found in his book Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary (2011). Its purpose is to use spoken words to convey thoughts or emotions.
According to Carter and McCarthy (2006), an utterance is a communicative unit that comprises some linguistic terms, which is consistent with the description given above. Those are context-related words, clauses, phrases, and clause combinations.
According to Crystal (1991: 405), an utterance lacks a precise linguistic definition.
A dialogue makes each utterance very obvious, and each statement made by a speaker is referred to as an utterance. Additionally, a phonetically defined utterance is a spoken segment that is separated by a pause.
3) Sentence
According to Crowther (1995), a phrase is a combination of words used to convey a remark, question, exclamation, request, grumble, order, or suggestion. It typically begins with a capital letter when it is written. A sentence is an expression that must have a subject and a predicate at the very least. Complements and adjuncts are two more types of elements that can be used in sentences. The sentences that follow are examples.
4) Speech Event
According to Yule (1996: 56), a speech event is any action in which a participant uses language to communicate with others in a customary manner in order to achieve a specific goal. A speech event can also be thought of as the fundamental analytical building block of a spoken encounter. He continues by stating that there are two methods to make an indirect request and that requesting is one type of speech event. They are the preparatory condition and the content condition. Although they have distinct forms, these two terminologies serve the same purposes as a request. In this instance, speech events are required in order to properly interpret them. In order for the hearer to respond as if the request had been made, one may just execute one speech act in a single utterance or one may make
multiple utterances without performing a single speech act explicitly. For instance, when a speaker makes an indirect request, she or he is requesting the listener to do something by making only one speech act in a single utterance, such as "will you do X? or Can you do X?" where X refers to the activities or need that the hearer must fulfill.
2.1.3 The Scopes of Pragmatics 1) Deixis
Deixis is concerned with how language encodes context-relevant elements of utterances as well as with how such utterances are to be interpreted (Levinson, 1983: 54). Yule (1996: 9) offers a different definition of deixis. He claims that the word "deixis" is a Greek word that means "to point something by language," and he divides it into three groups (1996: 10–14):
a. Person Deixis b. Spatial Deixis c. Temporal Deixis 2) Cooperative Principle
When engaging in conversational engagements, people typically employ cooperative principles as their guide, which usually works between the speakers and hearers. Grice asserts that "there is a general assumption underpinning all utterance interpretations" (Leech, 1983: 7-8). These interpretations are inspired by the cooperative principle, which holds that a speaker and an audience have common objectives. The framework of this cooperative concept is composed of several maxims.
a. Maxim of Quality b. Maxim of Quantity c. Maxim of Relation d. Maxim of Manner 3) Implicature
Grice describes implicature as "what the speaker can imply, suggest or mean as different from what the speaker litteraly says"
(Levinson, 1983: 31). As a result, in order to comprehend a speaker's message, the listener must be able to infer the speaker's intended
meaning because occasionally a speaker conveys more information than is actually expressed. Both an explicit and an implicit message may be sent by the speaker. Then, Grice divides implicature into two categories:
conventional implicature and conversational implicature (Levinson, 1983: 127–128).
4) Presupposition
The link between two assertions is referred to as the presupposition. A presupposition is anything that the speaker assumes to be true before making an utterance, according to Yule (1996: 25). In the meantime, Givon claims that the term "presupposition" refers to a discourse analysis (in Brown and Yule, 1983: 29). It speaks about a sentence's logical significance.
5) Speech act
Speech acts are "the basic or the minimal units of linguistic communication" according to Searle's theory (1976:16). According to Austin (1960:52), a speech act includes both the utterance itself and the context in which it is made. The following chapter will cover the speaking act in further detail.
2.2 Speech Act
2.2.1 The Definition of Speech Act
A crucial value is present in the speech act, which is a pragmatic component.
J.L. Austin initially discussed the theory of speech acts in his 1962 book How to Do Things with Words. He said in his work that when we speak or write something, we are acting. An action that is communicated verbally is referred to as a speech act. The participants in a conversation or communication, the format in which the message is conveyed, the message's subject, and its context are all examples of speech acts.
According to Austin (1962: 94), there are two types of utterances in speech acts with a declarative model: (1) constative, which is an assertion that is factual and verifiable based on known information, such as "Madrid is the capital of Spain," and (2) performative, which is an assertion that is delivered along with the intention to do something, such as "I apologize if I hurt you all this time." In performative utterance, the validity of the speech can be established by the existence of a general convention that indicates that the speech has a particular effect. Participants must conduct the procedures, and the procedures must be performed correctly and appropriately.
Austin (1962) eventually came to the conclusion that constatives and performatives could not be clearly distinguished from one another since constatives turned out to be merely a subset of performatives. Constatatives execute the describing, stating, or asserting that goes along with saying something. With this knowledge, Austin started his task of examining the logical structure of performatives. Additionally, practically all speech acts are actually the simultaneous performance of multiple acts, each of which expresses a distinct component of the speaker's intention.
The speech act theory was afterwards created by John Searle while he was a student of professor J.L. Austin. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, written by Searle in 1969, contains the development of the theory of speech acts. Searle provides a more thorough explanation of his thesis in this book. According to Searle (1975), speech acts like asserting, requesting, commanding, apologizing, praising, congratulating, etc. are the lowest unit of communication. According to his developed theory, every word comprises an action, not just those with performative verbs (Nadar, 2009). A slightly different account of the degrees of speech acts than Austin's is provided by Searle (1969). According to him, a speaker completes three actions when he or she speaks a sentence: an utterance act, a propositional act, and an illocutionary act.
2.2.2 Types of Speech Acts
According to Searle, who wrote Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, there are three different types of acts that addressers might pragmatically realize: locutionary acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts.
As a result, among other things, the hypothesis of the division of speech actions will be explained further below:
1. Locutionary Act
According to Searle in Rahardi (2005), a lexical act occurs when someone speaks using words, phrases, and sentences that have the same meaning as those words, phrases, and sentences. According to the definition of the terms themselves, this act is done to declare or inform something from the addresser to the addressee.
For example:
1) This room is very dark.
2) It is boring to be here.
In the first utterance, "this room" alludes to the location of the addresser, and "very dark" alludes to the room's obscurity and lack of light without intending to request that the lights be turned on. In the second utterance, the addresser uses the term "boring" to let the addressee know that there is nothing exceptional they can do there, which will make them bored.
The addressee doesn't request to be taken somewhere more pleasant; they are merely expressing facts. As a result, this is the first act of speaking that result in a meaningful linguistic phrase.
2. Illocutionary Act
Illocutionary act is the act of doing an activity using speech. This action differs from locutionary action in that it is designed to perform a specific action with a defined goal and function. The articulatory act in the utterance is distinctive since the addresser asks the addressee to consent to some things.
For example:
1) This room is very dark.
2) It is boring to be here.
The addresser signals in the first utterance by requesting that the addressee turn on the light as soon as possible so that objects in the room can be viewed clearly. Additionally, the second utterance's illocutionary connotation alludes to the addressee's request to be welcomed to leave the area and go for a stroll or hang out somewhere that will lessen the boredom. As a result, the addresser conducts this act using the communication power of speech that serves a purpose in their minds.
3. Perlocutionary Act
The definition of a perlocutionary act is the same as that of an illocutionary act, which is to perform an action through speech. The difference between the two is that the addressee can be influenced and affected by a perlocutionary act in a speech. The circumstance that the addresser describes in both verbal and action form of their statement has an impact.
For example:
1) This room is very dark.
2) It is boring to be here.
The impact of Example 1 is that the addressee replies promptly by turning on the light, making it easier for the addresser to look around.
Example 1 not only notifies the addressee but also requests the addressee to turn on the lamp because the addresser cannot see anything. In example 2, the addresser complains to the addressee that he is bored because nothing interesting is happening there. The addressee's response may be to invite the addresser to go somewhere interesting to kill boredom, or it may simply be an ignorant response. In summary, the perlocutionary act is the act of influencing another person through speech and results in an outcome, such as acceptance or rejection.
2.3 Classification of Illocutionary Speech Act
Two important components of speech acts theory have been proposed by Searle. He believes that the manifestation of the intention to conduct an act is sufficient for that act to be performed. Searle also attempted to categorize speech acts into groups based on shared sets of conditions. However, he found this difficult and instead developed a set of criteria for defining speech acts (Searle, 1975). Searle classifies five primary categories of speech acts:
1. Representative
Representative speech acts, also known as assertive speech acts, are utterances that commit the speaker to the reality of a specific concept. The representative speech act use language to inform people about how things are, such as concluding, telling, asserting, hypothesizing, and so on. For example, "Nicole Kidman is a beautiful woman." The sentence is a formal declaration. The speaker can state the sentence based on facts or simply express his or her own opinion regarding a person's physical condition. It could be his or her subjunctive viewpoint.
2. Directive
Speech acts that are directive are those that try to persuade a listener to do something. The purpose of which is to influence the listener to take an action that has a world-to-word direction of fit, in which a want is stated, and in which the proposition is an act to be performed by the listener in the future. In other words, instructions utilize language in an effort to persuade a person to act in a certain way, such as by requiring, commanding, requesting, advising, proposing, etc. The phrase "Open the door!" said by a father to his son is an illustration of this type of
speech act. There is a directing speech act in the sentence. In this instance, "father"
commands "his son" to close the door on behalf of the hearer.
3. Commissives
Similar to directives, commissions operate by imposing a duty, which changes the world. In this instance, the speaker establishes the duty. In other words, a commisives is an act that binds the speaker to carry out a future action that fits the world to the words used; it expresses an intention; and the proposition is an act that the speaker will carry out in the future. It includes words like pledge, bid, curse, etc. As an example of a compliant speech act, consider the phrase "I will marry you as soon as possible." The speaker makes a promise to the listener in this line. It demonstrates that the promise hasn't yet been fulfilled. The speaker makes a commitment to marry the hearer as quickly as feasible.
4. Expressive
The essential point of expressiveness is the expression of a specific psychological state. It expresses the speaker's inner feelings about something. It is when there is no direction of fit; when the proposition attributes a property or act to the speaker or hearer. In other words, expressive employs language to express emotions and attitudes, such as apologizing, appreciating, and welcoming. "Thank you for coming," for example, is an example of expressive language. The speaker reflects his specific psychological state, which is gratitude. Because when it is stated, nothing changes.
5. Declarations
This speech act is being delivered by a person who has special permission to do so inside a particular institutional context. The goal is to create something in the language that fits well with both the environment and the language, doesn't communicate any psychological states, and allows for proposal. In order for declarations to be successful, they must be approved by the community, institution, committee, or even just one individual inside the group. Declarations are often aired within a social group. Declaring war, endorsing a candidate, etc. are examples of actions that fall under the heading of declaration. For instance, "I declare this national park to be opened." The president of a certain nation who has the power or responsibility to say the things above may have said them.
2.4 Movie Enola Holmes 2
The film titled "Enola Holmes 2" is a mystery film released in 2022, serving as the sequel to the 2020 film "Enola Holmes." This film explores a narrative that departs from the traditional Sherlock Holmes storyline, centering on the adolescence of the famous detective's sister. Both of these productions feature Millie Bobby Brown in the
lead role, portraying the adolescent sister of the famous Victorian-era sleuth Sherlock Holmes. The film was directed by Harry Bradbeer, who assumes the role of director, while the screenplay is crafted by Jack Thorne. The film in question is an adaptation of the literary work named "The Enola Holmes Mystery – The Case of the Missing Marquess," authored by Nancy Springer, a renowned English writer.
The initial film, "Enola Holmes," was acquired by Warner Bros during the epidemic, resulting in a production that exhibits a higher degree of cinematic quality.
The program made its debut in the year 2020 and quickly gained significant popularity among its audience. In the film, the character of Enola Holmes is portrayed by Millie Bobby Brown, who assumes the role of the younger sister to Sherlock Holmes. Enola Holmes is depicted as an aspiring investigator, showcasing her own investigative abilities. Audiences have the opportunity to immerse themselves further in the mysterious, imaginative, and frightening elements that made the first scene captivating.
The second part of the Enola Holmes film series was released on the popular streaming platform Netflix on November 4, 2022. In the upcoming sequel of Enola Holmes, audiences will have the opportunity to revisit an interesting cast of eccentric detectives and enthusiasts of mysteries. This cinematic endeavor invites viewers to reconnect themselves with familiar characters while also introducing fresh faces to the narrative.
The film serves as a critical analysis of the concept of women's empowerment, while also incorporating a significant amount of action sequences. The film "Enola Holmes" portrays the narrative of an exceptional adolescent female protagonist, exploring the challenges faced by women in their pursuit of equal rights and opportunities throughout the depicted historical period. The protagonist, characterized by their intellect, courage, and sagacity, demonstrates the capacity to overcome any deficiencies inside the governmental framework. The central protagonist in this narrative is the younger sibling of the renowned fictional figure, Sherlock Holmes, who is widely recognized as the greatest investigator globally. Enola Holmes is determined to locate her mother, Eudoria Vernet Holmes, who suddenly vanished on the occasion of her sixteenth birthday.
In the sequel to Enola Holmes, the protagonist, Enola Holmes (played by Millie Bobby Brown), begins on another adventure after successfully solving her initial case.
Inspired by her famous brother, Sherlock Holmes (portrayed by Henry Cavill), Enola establishes her own detective business. However, she soon discovers that the challenges she faces as a female detective-for-hire are more complex than anticipated. Having come
to terms with the harsh realities of life, she is on the edge of closing her business establishment when a destitute matchstick girl presents Enola with her debut career opportunity: the task of discovering her absent sibling.
2.5 Previous Study
1. The first study was conducted by Putri et al. (2020) from Airlangga University in Surabaya, Indonesia. Their study was named "A cross-cultural pragmatic study of illocutionary acts of judges' comments in America's Next Top Model and Asia's Next Top Model competitions." They concentrated on the five types of illocutionary acts and the function of illocutionary acts, comparing America's next model and Asia's next model on YouTube, and concluded that the total illocutionary speech acts were 146 utterances (72 from America and 74 from Asia). The predominant types in America's Next Top Model were forceful and declarative (33.33%), while expressive function was shown to be the most dominant in Asia's Next Top Model, with Asians being more expressive than Americans in cross-cultural pragmatic.
2. The second study, titled "Illocutionary Speech Acts Analysis in Tom Cruise's Interview,"
was carried out by Haucsa (2020). Downloading the interview video from YouTube served as the study's data source. The information is noticed and recorded in writing. The findings indicated that Tom Cruise engaged in representational, commissive, directive, and expressive illocutionary speech acts during the interview. In this case, the most frequently used speech in the interview was the representative speech acts. The findings of the current study demonstrated that Tom Cruise frequently used his speech to make factual declarations or to express things that he took to be real. However, in Tom Cruise's interview, representative (48.7%), expressive (38.5%), commissive (7.7%), directive (5.1%), and declarative (0.0%) are the speech acts that are most frequently employed or done.
3. Another study, An Analysis of Directive Speech Acts by Searle Theory in "Sleeping Beauty" Movie Script, was conducted by Della & Sembiring (2018). This study set out to identify the various forms of directive speech. They used a descriptive quantitative approach to analyze this study. Searle's idea of directive speech acts served as the foundation for this study. The information was extracted from the Sleeping Beauty movie's script. First, according to the research's findings, command, request, permission, restriction, and query were the different categories of directed speech acts. Second, the command kind of directive speech acts were the most common. Command has the highest rank across kinds (51 utterances), whereas prohibition has the lowest rank (2 utterances).
The command types (51 utterances) are the most frequently utilized in terms of reason since they typically convey each character's strength in a very clear way. The findings indicated that command was the type that was used the most.
4. A study by Fita Nur Rahayu, M. Bahri Arifin, and Setya Ariani (2018) with the title
"Illocutionary Act in the Main Characters' Utterances in Mirror Mirror Movie" is comparable to this one. They conducted their study in a descriptive qualitative manner.
The major characters' statements from the Mirror Mirror are the subject of this study. This study uses Searle's theory to identify the several illocutionary acts that the main characters of Mirror Mirror use in their speech, and it uses Hymes' Speaking Model to identify the context of those illocutionary acts. Following the research, 55 illocutionary acts were discovered, of which representational acts accounted for four, directing acts, which were found to be the most common, represented 37, commissive acts, two, expressive acts, and twelve, or none at all. According to the Hymes' Speaking Model, eight factors—settings, participation, ends, acts, sequences, keys, instrumentalities, and genres—are determined to be responsible for the employment of illocutionary acts.
REFERENCES
Austin, J. L. (1962). How do to Things with Words (p. 167). Oxford University Press.
Bosco, F.M. 2004. The Fudamental Context Categories Understanding Commimicarive Intention, Italv- Centro di Scienza Cognotivia, Universitas Torino.
Crowther, J. (2011). Encyclopedic leamers' dictionaries. The Perfect Learners' Dictionary (?), 95, 213.
Della, F., & Sembiring, B. (2018). An analysis of directive speech acts by Searle theory in
“Sleeping Beauty” movie script. Journal of English Education and Teaching, 2(1) Della, F., & Sembiring, B. (2018). An analysis of directive speech acts by Searle theory in “Sleeping Beauty” movie script. Journal of English Education and Teaching, 2(1), 22-27., 22-27.
Farah, N.R. (2019). An Analysis on Illocutionary Acts in Whatsapp Status Written By English Department Students of Iain Kediri. Undergraduate Thesis. Kediri: IAIN Kediri
Goodman, N.D., & Frank, M. (2016). Pragmatic Language Interpretation as Probabilistic Inference. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 20(11), 818-829.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.08.005
Haucsa, G. M., Marzuki, A. G., Alek, A., & Hidayat, D. N. (2020). Illocutionary speech acts analysis in Tom Cruise's interview. Academic Journal Perspective: Education, Language, and Literature, 8(1), 11-19.
Horn, Laurence R. and Ward, Gregory. 2004. The Handbook of Pragmatic. Malden: Black well Publishing Ltd
Leech, Geoffrey L. (1989). Principles of Pragmatics. New York: Longman.
Levinson, Stephen C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Nadar, FX. Pragmatik dan Penelitian Pragmatik. Yogyakarta: Graha Ilmu. 2009.
Paltridge, Brian. (2012). Discourse Analysis an Introduction. New York: Bloomsbury
Putri, R. A., Sartini, N. W., & Al Fajri, M. S. (2020). The analysis of illocutionary acts of judges’ comments in America’s next top model and Asia’s next top model competitions: A cross-cultural pragmatic study. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 16(4), 1885-1898.
Rahardi, Kunjana. 2005. Pragmatik: Kesantunan Imperatif Bahasa Indonesia. Jakarta:
Erlangga.
Rahayu, F. N., Arifin, M. B., & Ariani, S. (2018). ILLOCUTIONARY ACT IN THE MAIN CHARACTERS’UTTERANCES IN MIRROR MIRROR MOVIE. Ilmu Budaya:
Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni dan Budaya, 2(2), 175-187.
Searle, H. (1969). Speech Act (An Essay in The Philosophy of Language). Cambridge Un Uiversity Press.
Searle, J. (1976). A Classification of Illocutionary Acts. Cambridge University Press.
Searle, John R. (1979). Expression and Meaning: Studies in The Theory of Speech Acts.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Silalahi, P.V. (2016). A Highlight on Pragmatics. Parafrase. 16(1), 83-92
Yan Huang. (2014). Pragmatics. Sage Journals.16(5), 695-697 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445614538144
Yi-hua Zhu. 2011. Constructiveness of Context for Pragmatics. China: Jiangnan University, Wuxi. Yule, G. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
