An analysis of commissive speech acts employed by the characters in the movie “a bug’s life” (a pragmatics study)

Oleh :
Kurnia Dwi Puspitasari - C0305039 - Sekolah Pascasarjana

Abstrak This research was conducted to figure out the types of commissive speech acts in the movie entitled A Bug’s Life, the reasons of the speakers in uttering such type, and the way of how the speakers exploit those types. This research used the Pragmatics approach with speech act as the field of study. It was a descriptive qualitative research and it employed purposive sampling as the sampling technique. Therefore, the data in this research were data that had important relationship with the problems being observed. Here, only the types of commissive speech acts were analyzed, i.e. the expressions which express the speaker’s intention toward the future action. From the result of the data analysis, there are six types of commissive speech acts employed by the characters in the movie A Bug’s Life. They are promises, guarantees, refusals, threats, volunteers, and offers. The result of this research shows that there are some functions of commissives. Promises, offers, and volunteers are expressed to maintain and repair the relationship. Promises are also used by the speakers when they try to show loyalty, love and care to the hearers. Guarantees are expressed to get sympathy from the hearers and to express the belief and conviction of the speakers about something. Refusals are expressed to show the dislike and distrust of the speakers to the hearers and also to save the speakers from the bad effects made by the hearers or to avoid conflicts with the hearers. Threats are uttered to express the negative feeling and anger of the speakers to the hearers and also to intimidate the hearers as a form of the speakers’ intention to show the higher power and status. The other finding of this research is that the speakers use verbal and non-verbal expression in uttering commissives. The verbal expression means that the speakers utter a direct or indirect speech act, an explicit or implicit statement, in high, normal, or low intonation. The non-verbal expression is commonly done through body language to emphasize the speech acts which is performed via eyes gaze, facial expression (happy, sad, annoyed, angry, and disappointed), and body movement (nodding the head, shaking the hands, and pushing the hearer). The analysis also shows that the six types of commissives found in the movie A Bug’s Life are shaped based on the theme and the sub themes establishing the context of situation to make the characters perform those six types of commissives, although some of the speech acts are shaped as the development of the story. Based on the findings, it is suggested that the students who are interested in Speech Acts Study are expected to explore the speech acts especially about commissives to find out that commissive speech acts are not only classified into promise, threat, guarantee, offer, volunteer, and refusal. There are still many others types of commissives which can be found in the interactions, while for the other researchers, there are still many other classifications of speech act that can be taken into the similar field of research. The researcher expects that the other researchers will be interested in conducting a research about speech acts as a further and a more detailed analysis in the same field by taking the other classifications of speech acts such as directives, representatives, expressives, or declarations in the movie A Bug’s Life. It is also possible to the other researchers to conduct the same research in the different sources of data such as the other movie, novel, or drama.