ILLOCUTIONARY SPEECH ACT ANALYSIS OF THE CHARACTERS IN PURL SHORT-FILM

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the pragmatics-linguistics of illocutionary speech act and to describe the types as well as the function of illocutionary speech acts produced by the characters of Purl movie. The data focuses on the characters’ utterances in Purl movie that is about the woman yarn which is worked at B.R.O Company and she is different from other employee. In particular, this study adopts a framework proposed by Searle (1976) and employs a qualitative descriptive method, with the subject of the analysis referring to the film transcript data collected through the dialogues of the characters in the film being observed. In this study, it was discovered that several speech act functions were used in the film, including expressive speech act, representative speech act, directive speech act, and commissive speech act. The expressive speech act is used to express emotions and attitudes through propositions. The representative or assertive speech act, commits the speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition. The directive speech act causes the listener to take a specific action. The commissive speech act commits the speaker to some future actions. Furthermore, the researchers also found that the most dominant type of illocutionary act used is expressive speech act. It is indicated by the characters’ dialogues, which show that the characters quite often use expressive speech acts, such as when Purl, the main character, works on her first day at work, she expresses her enthusiasm many times by saying “It’s unbelieveable” and “I’m so excited.”