Locutionary Act Case Study

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1.1. Background of Study Speech act is actions performed via utterances (Yule, 1996: 47). Speech acts are divided into three acts, namely locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act (Austin, 1970). First, locutionary tells about what is said by people. The second, illocutionary act talks about what is the meaning behind an utterance. Illocutionary act is used to explain the real purpose of someone’s utterance. The third, perlocutionary tells about the effect of an utterance to the hearer. The real purpose of someone’s utterance sometimes will be interpreted differently by the hearer. That is why there will be several effects of just one utterance. For example, an utterance “it’s cold outside” (Yule, 1996: 55) can be interpreted …show more content…

2.3.1.1 Locutionary Act Locutionary act is the basic act of utterance, or producing linguistic expression. If a speaker has a difficulty in forming the sounds and words to create a meaningful utterance, then the speaker is failed to produce a locutionary act (Yule, 1996: 48). To make it simple, we can say that a locutionary act is the utterances said by a speaker. For example, there is a sentence which said “I’ve just made some coffee”; that sentence is called as locutionary act, because that sentence is the basic act of utterance (Yule, 1996: 48). 2.3.1.2 Illocutionary Act An illocutionary act is some kind of function in speaker’s mind when he/she says something. Most people do not just produce utterances without a purpose behind it (Yule, 1996: 48). We can simply say that an illocutionary act is what the speaker intends to deliver to the addressee (Kreidler, 1998: 181). For instance, the previous example “I’ve just made some coffee” might utter to make a statement, an offer, an explanation, or for some other communicative purpose (Yule, 1996: 48). 2.3.1.3 Perlocutionary

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