Complaint expressions used by the characters in the film entitled “pursuit of happiness” ( a socio-pragmatics approach)

Oleh :
Wahyu Satoto - C1306535 - Fak. Sastra dan Seni Rupa

This research focuses on the complaint expressions used by the characters in the film entitled Pursuit of Happiness. This research is conducted to describe the strategies of complaining used by the characters in the movie “Pursuit of Happiness”, to describe the functions of the act of complaining employed by the speakers, and to identify the responses of the complainees towards the complaints. This research is a descriptive qualitative research. This research uses a socio-pragmatics approach. The sampling technique used in this research is total sampling. The conversations containing complaint expressions in the film “Pursuit of Happiness” are taken as the data. From the result of the data analysis, the researcher draws conclusions, they are: There are five types of complaint strategies that are employed by the characters in the movie entitled Pursuit of Happiness, namely: hint strategy, direct accusation strategy, modified blame strategy, explicit condemnation of accused’s action strategy and explicit condemnation of the accused as a person strategy. According to the directness level of the complaint that is proposed by Anna Trosborg, Hint strategy is the mildest strategy and explicit condemnation of the accused as a person strategy is the most severe one. Anna Trosborg proposes Internal and External modification as an additional strategy. Hence, Internal modification dominates the whole data over the External ones. There are three functions of complaint expressions employed by the characters in the film entitled Pursuit of Happiness, namely: to break relationship or create a social distance, repair the relationship and improve the situation, and show negative feeling or specific negative evaluation only. Complaint expressions produced by the speaker has particular function which is appropriate with its context. There are eight types of responses that are employed by the complainee to respond the complaint of the complainer. They are denial, apology, tease, zero, change topic, explanation, justification, and challenge. Respond categories of “excuse” was not found in my data analysis. Based on the conclusions above, the researcher hopes that this research gives a contribution to the students in studying the speech act of complaints. There are still many cases on the study of complaints. It is suggested to other researchers who are interested in Socio-Pragmatics study to conduct a further research on complaints depicted in other movies or other sources such as novel and drama.