Content analysis method was also employed due to get description of the research phenomena which in the forms of words, clauses, phrases, and sentences

(1)

SPEECH ACTS ANALYSIS AND ITS APPLICATION WITHIN THE INTERLOCUTORS’ COMMUNICATION

Kamarudin¹

English Language Education

Faculty of Culture, Management, and Business Mandalika University of Education

Abstract

This research deals with Speech Acts Analysis and Its Application Within the Interlocutors’ Communication which focused on its kinds, functions, and how each kind of illocutionary acts is performed by the students in FBMB Undikma under A Pragmatic Analysis. The kinds of speech acts;

locutionary acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts. The functions of illocutionary acts; representative, directive, commissive, expressive, and declarative. A descriptive qualitative method was employed since the data being analysed was in the form of descriptive data. Content analysis method was also employed due to get description of the research phenomena which in the forms of words, clauses, phrases, and sentences.

There were twenty-four fragments being analysed. As the result, based on its classification, it showed that the most dominantly performed was locutionary acts 224 times, then followed by illocutionary acts 223 times, and the last one was perlocutionary acts 215 times. The declarative sentence had the highest frequency performed 131 times and in terms of the functions;

representative had the highest frequency performed 163 times. It is found that representative was the highest frequency performed by the speakers as asserting, explaining, agreeing, suggesting, asking, reporting, informing, demanding, telling, claiming, affirming, denying, disbelieving, concluding, calling, answering, introducing, greeting, and clarifying.

https://journal.uinmataram.ac.id/index.php/cordova/index

(2)

Key Words: Speech Acts, Locutionary acts, Illocutionary acts, perlocutionary acts.

INTRODUCTION

Fromkin, et al. (2011 : 03) revealed that whatever else people do when they come together—whether they play, fight, make love, or make automobiles—they talk. People live in a world of language, talk to their friends, associates, wives and husbands, lovers, teachers, parents, rivals, and even enemies. Talk to bus drivers and total strangers. Talk face-to-face and over the telephone, and everyone responds with more talk. Television and radio further swell this torrent of words. Hardly a moment of the waking lives is free from words, and even in dreams people talk and are talked to. People also talk when there is no one to answer.

Sometimes talk aloud in sleep. And also talk to the pets and sometimes to the people themselves.

Language is used for many purposes. It can be for expressing feelings, asking questions, protesting, criticizing, making requests, promising, thanking, insulting, apologizing, and say hello and goodbye. In other word, by using language human can transmit a message, information or any ideas to hearer. Every utterance produced by people causes what we call ‘speech acts.

Austin (1962) proposed that communicating a speech acts consists of three elements, those are the speaker says something (locutionary act), the speaker signal an associated speech act

(3)

(illocutionary acts), and the speech act causes an effect on the listeners or the participants (perlocutionary acts).

Based on the statements above, it is noted that speech act;

illocutionary acts, is an interesting topic to be searched since it is not only found in common language, but also in the context of teaching and learning. Yet, not many of scholars take into account to further search on this topic. Thus, this study raised the case and focused on analysing illocutionary acts particularly in FBMB (Faculty of Culture, Management, and Business) UNDIKMA under A Pragmatics Analysis.

Theoretically and practically, this research is expected to contribute to the development of the theoretical basis, particularly to clarify their features and scope in the domain of teaching and learning linguistics study, and conducting scientific study in English or other languages. Furthermore, it is also expected to give contribution to the implementation of this study of the teaching and learning linguistics and literature in character building oriented, and the politeness principles of speech acts;

illocutionary acts.

LITERATURE REVIEW A. A Pragmatics Analysis

Levinson, (1983: 9) revealed that the term pragmatics shelters both context-dependent features of language construction and philosophies of language practice and understanding that

(4)

have nothing or little to do with linguistics construction. This means that pragmatics is concerned with quite desperate and unrelated aspects of language. In pragmatics, there is a sentence’s meaning and speaker’s meaning which in the literal meaning of the concept the speaker is trying to convey to the hearer what he or she wants the hearer to do. The main relationship between pragmatics and speech acts is that speech acts is a part of pragmatics in which pragmatics is talking about how language is used in particular situation. To strengthen this statement, it is quoted from Fromkin, et al. (2011: 216) that pragmatics is very important in conveying and interpreting meaning in communication, especially the relationship between sentence and contexts, and situation in which they are occurred.

Thus, pragmatics is the study of speaker’s meaning, contextual meaning, the study of how more meaning gets communicated than it said, and it is the study of the expression of relative distance.

B. Contextual Features

Hymes in Brown and Yule (1983: 40) have specified the features of context which is relevant to the identification of components and the type of speech acts, they are: participants, topic, setting, channel, code, message form, event, key, and purpose.

C. Speech Acts

(5)

There are two philosophers who first proposed speech acts theory, first spelled out by Austin (1962) he introduced the idea of speech acts and the relationship between utterances and performance. The second philosopher is his follower J. R. Searle (1969: 16) who believes that all linguistics communication involved linguistic acts. The unit of linguistic communication is not, as he generally been supposed, the symbol or word or sentence in the performance of a speech act and there is a shift towards the events or acts that occur via language, hence the name ``speech acts''. More precisely, the production or issuance of a sentence takes under certain condition is a speech act, and speech acts are the basic or the minimal units of linguistics communication.

Searle, (1969: 18) expresses that the speech act or acts performed in the utterance of a sentence are in general, a function of meaning of the sentence. The meaning of a sentence does not in all cases uniquely determine what speech act is performed in a given utterance of that sentence, for a speaker may mean more what actually he says, but it is always in principle possible for him to say exactly what he means.

D. Kinds of Speech Acts 1. Locutionary Acts

Locutionary act is the production of a meaningful linguistic expression, (Mey, 2009: 1002). The act of saying something that makes sense in language i.e. follows the rules of pronunciation

(6)

and grammar. Yule and Stubbs (Yule, 1996: 48; Stubbs, 1983:98- 99) further explain that in performing a locutionary act, one also performs an act such as stating, asking or answering a question, reminding, and informing.

(7)

2. Illocutionary Acts

Illocutionary act is the action intended to be performed by a speaker in uttering a linguistic expression, by virtue of the conventional force associated with it, either explicitly or implicitly, (Mey, 2009: 1002).

The illocutionary act refers to the fact that when ones say something, he/she usually says it with some purposes in mind. In other words, an illocutionary act refers to the type of functions that the speaker intends to fulfil, or the action that the speaker intends to accomplish in the course of producing an utterance; it is also an act defined within a system of social conventions. In short, it is an act accomplished in speaking. Examples of illocutionary acts include accusing, apologizing, blaming, congratulating, declaring war, giving permission, joking, marrying, nagging, naming, promising, ordering, refusing, swearing, and thanking. The functions or actions just mentioned are also commonly referred to as the illocutionary ‘force’ (or

‘point’) of the utterance. For instance; in the novel,

“I promise” she said as air rushed back into her lungs, she found herself standing alone on the curb as the bus pulled off. Tentatively she touched her fingers to her lips while she watched the bus kick up dirt and turn the bend, “I promise”.

In relation to those explanations, Mey, (2009: 2003) has argued that the meaning of a sentence consists in it having a

(8)

certain illocutionary act potential (IAP) that is closely and conventionally associated with its form. On this view, to know what a sentence means is to know what range of illocutionary acts it can be conventionally used to perform. Conversely, the same speech act can be performed by different linguistic expressions, or the same illocutionary force can be realized by means of different locutionary acts.

Of the discussion above, the researcher gained that it may the same illocutionary acts can be performed by a different linguistics expression in different occasion, and different time, because it may also the same utterance can be produced by the same person but in different occasion will have different meaning as well.

3. Perlocutionary Acts.

Perlocutionary act is the bringing about of consequences or effects on the audience through the uttering of a linguistic expression, such consequences or effects being special to the circumstances of utterance, (Mey, 2009: 1002).

A perlocutionary act concerns the effect an utterance may have on the addressee. Put slightly more technically, a perlocution is the act by which the illocution produces a certain effect in or exerts a certain influence on the addressee. Still another way to put it is that a perlocutionary act represents a consequence or by-product of speaking, whether intentional or not. The effect of the act being performed by speaking is

(9)

generally known as the perlocutionary effect. There is an extensive literature on the differentiation between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts (Mey, 2009: 1003).

E. The Functions of Speech Acts

Yule (1996:53, Leech, 1983: 105-106, Levinson, 1983: 240) revealed that there are just five basic kinds of actions that one can perform in speaking, by means of the following five types of general functions of performed by speech acts: representatives, directives, commissive, expressive, and declarations.

RESEARCH METHOD A. Research Design

This study applied a qualitative approach to analyse illocutionary acts towards the students of English Education at FPBM Undikma since the data are in the form of' words. Denzin and Lincoln (1998: 3) describe qualitative research as a study of things in natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them. Qualitative research involves the studies use and collections of variety of empirical materials-case study, personal experience, introspective, life story, interview, historical, instructional, and visual texts- that describe routine and problematic movement, and meanings in possible life. The content analysis was also employed in this research to maintain and fragmenting the speech.

(10)

(11)

B. The Source of the Data and Data

The source of data in this study was three students of English Education at FPBM Undikma utterances which were classified into fragments. There were 40 fragments with the main considerations of the reduction on the main speakers’

involvement, were taken as the object of the analysis of the utterances with the main consideration focused on the main characters’ involvement, the relevance of the topics. Those students were taken from different classes as the representative.

C. Research Instrument.

Since the object of the data is a novel written by Donna Hill What Mother Never Told Me, then the researcher will become the key instrument in this study and the data is in the form words.

This novel is read continually, recognizably, and finally identifies the units of speech acts in each section to be related to each other as a whole as well as recognizes and identifies the context in order to interpret the meaning easily and find out the kinds of speech acts.

D. Procedures of Data Collection

1. Interviewing the Students to Get the Utterances Needed To gain the data needed, the researcher carefully, intensively, and comprehensively interviews the students under the certain topics.

2. Segmenting the utterance into Fragments

(12)

After taking the data, it is then segmented into fragments which are related to the topics of a conversation. It is done due to know the setting or the context of the conversation performed by the students.

3. Identifying the Data (Illocutionary Acts) of Each Fragment After segmenting, then identifying the kinds of illocutionary acts, the functions of illocutionary acts as well as the ways each kind of illocutionary is used by the students.

4. Procedures of Data Analysis

After conducting the whole procedures of the data collection, it is then conducting the data analysis which is under the main procedures; they are; classifying the data which refers to the illocutionary act’s classification.

The data which refers to the kinds of illocutionary acts is analysed based Austin’s (1962) classification (locutionary acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts). And the data which refers to the functions of illocutionary acts; it is then analysed based on the Searle’s (1969) classifications (representative, directive, commissive, expressive, and declarative). The data which refers to the way each kinds of illocutionary acts is used is then analysed based on Yule’s (1996) classification of the structural forms of sentences (declarative, interrogative, and imperative). It is then followed by the description of the utterances in the fragments.

FINDING AND DISCUSSION

(13)

This part deals with finding and discussion of illocutionary acts which is performed by the three students of FBMB Undikma.

1. The Kinds of Illocutionary Acts Performed by the Students of FBMB Undikma Mataram.

After analysing the data which were in the form of words, sentences, and phrases taken during process of collecting data needed. The data was gained in form of interview; conversation form. Of the data, then the researcher firstly fragmenting the whole conversation which consists of 65 fragments under the focus of the consideration that those fragments are taken from all of the students without separating the three main students as the main focus of the data. The 60 fragments were then reduced into 50 fragments with the main consideration of the reduction is focused on the main students’ involvement. Of the 50 fragments, 40 fragments were then taken as the object of the analysis with the main consideration of the reduction were focused on main characters’ involvement, and the relevance topics.

It is truly found that the Austin’s theory of the kinds of Illocutionary acts is existed in the conversation of the students at FBMB Undikma Mataram. Those kinds of Illocutionary that the students performed were Locutionary acts, Illocutionary acts, and Perlocutionary acts. This description is tabled in the table below;

The kinds of illocutionary acts performed by the students of FBMB Undikma Mataram

Locutionary acts

Illocutionary acts

Perlocutionary acts

Total frequency

of

(14)

repetition

180 167 115 464

Based on the result of the analysis about the kinds of illocutionary acts performed by the three main students that the highest dominantly performed that is locutionary acts 180 times, it is then followed by illocutionary acts 167 times, and the lowest frequency of repetition is perlocutionary acts 115. Thus, the number of the total repetition found that the kinds of speech acts are repeated 464 times. This means that the speakers, most of them performed locutionary acts to tell, ask, or order the hearers to do something that the speakers believe that it truly happened.

2. The Functions of illocutionary acts performed by the students of FBMB Undikma Mataram.

This part represents the functions that the three main students performed at FBMB Undikma Mataram. The result of this analysis shows that the most dominant functions performed by the three main characters are representative 163 times. It is then followed by directive 28 times, expressive 26 times, commissive is 5 times, and none of the characters performed declarative function. So, the total count of the functions performed is 224 times.

Table 4.30. The summary of the functions of speech acts performed by the students of FBMB Undikma Mataram.

The functions of illocutionary acts performed by the students of FBMB Undikma Mataram

Illocutionary acts Total

(15)

freque ncy of repetiti

on Represent

ative Direct

ive Commis

sive Express

ive Declarat

ive 224

163 28 26 5 -

Based on the result of the analysis about the functions of speech acts performed by the students above that the highest dominantly performed that is representative 163 times, it is then followed by directive 28 times, expressive 26 times, commissive is 5 times, and none of the characters performed declarative function. And the total count of the functions performed is 224 times. This means that the speakers, most of them performed representative function to commit the truth of the expressed proposition. It means that the speakers believe what they said is true. The speaker may know from observation, experience or knowledge. It is usually to assert, conclude state, suggest, boast, complain, claim, and report, etc.

3. The Way Each Kind of Speech Acts Performed by the students of FBMB Undikma Mataram.

This part deals with the way or how the speech acts were performed by the students. Based on the findings that the meaning of utterances did not always depend on the forms of sentences. Meanings that a declarative sentence is not always as a statement, but it can be representative, directive, commissive, and expressive, as well as interrogative sentence, it is not

(16)

always as a question, or imperative sentence is not always a command or an order, yet, interrogative sentence may functioned as representative and expressive; and imperative sentence may functioned as a directive.

CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTION

After conducting the analysis and discussion on findings, it is concluded that the kinds of speech acts performed by the students were locutionary acts 224 times, illocutionary acts 222 times, and perlocutionary acts 215 times, and the total frequency count of the kinds of speech acts was 661 times. The speakers also produced three types of sentences; they were; declarative 131 times, interrogative 75 times, and imperative 18 times.

While, there were four kinds of functions performed; they were directive, commissive, expressive, and representative. The frequency count shows that the dominant Searle’s speech acts categories were representative 163 times, it is followed by directive 28 times, commissive 26 times, expressive 6 times, and none of the speakers performed declarative function. The total frequency count is 662 times.

This research finds out that speech acts can be used to signal the interrelationship between one elements of a speech/

communication in daily life with the others. This means that the use of speech acts may help someone to smooth the flow of talk (i.e., conversation). Thus, it is worth suggesting here that the use

(17)

of speech acts could be extended, strengthened and improved in the practical contexts to cover the attempts to conduct further research in this topic. So, it is advisable that future researchers could follow up the results of this study for the development of similar research in the field of pragmatics in English. This is strongly suggested because there are still many problems and the essences of pragmatics that need to be uncovered to help the users of English (e.g., English learners) to develop their understanding about the importance of this field of study in the contexts of language use, not only for the students of the tertiary education but also at the secondary education.

REFERENCES

Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford:

Clarendon Press.

Anggara, Dwi Asianti. 2007. Thesis. An Analysis of English Speech Acts in Cross Cultural Communication between Indonesian and Native Speakers. Universitas Negeri Surabaya, Program Pasca Sarjana Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa dan Sastra, (unpublished)

Borg, Walter R., and Gall, Meredith. 1983. Educational Research:

An Introduction. New York: Longman.

Brown, Gillian and Yule, George. 1983. Discourse Analysis.

Cambridge: University Press.

Cruse, Alan. 2000. Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Paragmatics. New York: Express University Press.

(18)

Cutting, Joan. 2002. Pragmatics and Discourse. London and New York: Rutledge.

Denzin, Norman K. and Lincoln, Yvonna S. 1998. The Landscape of Qualitative Research: Theories and Issues.

California: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Fromkin, Victoria., Rodman, Robert., and Hyams, Nina. 2011.

An Introduction to Language. Ninth Edition. Wadsworth:

Cengage Learning.

Gies, Michael L. 1995. Speech acts and Conversational Interaction. Cambridge: University Press.

Lestari, Chatarini Septi Ngudi. 2004. Thesis. An Analysis of Speech Acts in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers”.

Universitas Negeri Surabaya, Program Pasca Sarjana Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa dan Sastra.

(unpublished)

Leech, Geoffrey. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London:

Longman Group.

Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mey, Jacob. L. 2009. Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics:

Second Edition. Oxford: Elsevier Ltd.

Oishi, Etsuko. 2006. Austin’s Speech Acts Thoery and the Speech Situation. University Trieste: Esercizi Filosofici.

Vol. 1. Pp. 1-14.

Pamela, Stoll. 1996. Speech Acts and Conversation: The Interactional Development of Speech Acts Theory. In Universidad de Alicante, Departmento de Filologia Inglesa, Ap. Correos. Vol. 1133-682X. Pp. 3-4, 465-475.

(19)

Quinn, Edward. 2006. A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. Second Edition. New York: Facts on File, Inc.

Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stubbs, Michael. 1983. Discourse Analysis: The Sociolinguistic Analysis of Natural Language. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Yule, George. 1983. The Study of Language. New York:

Cambridge University Press.

Yule, George. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Yule, George. 2010. The Study of Language. Fourth Edition.

Cambridge: University Press.