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“It is cold here, isn’t it?”
The utterance above is said by a speaker who has been in a room with air conditioner. The expression “It is cold here, isn’t it?” belongs to locutionary act.
Meanwhile, the utterance has illocutionary act of requesting the speaker to turn off the air conditioner. Finally, the perlocutionary act emerged is that the hearer is
willing to turn off the air conditioner.
2. The Classification of Speech Acts
Searle 1976 in Cutting 2002: 16 classifies speech acts into five macro- classes:
a. Declarations
These are words and expressions that change the world by their particular utterances, such as “I bet”, “I declare”, and “I resign”. Therefore,
whenever a speaker utters declarations, he or she means that he or she intends to change someone’s life. In this case, the speaker should have an institutional
role in a certain context in order to perform declarations appropriately. Examples:
- Priest : I now pronounce you husband and wife.
- A President
: I name this ship “Titanic”.
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b. Representatives
These are acts in which the words state what the speaker believes to be the case, such as “describing”, “claiming”, “hypothesizing”, “insisting”, and
“predicting”. This means, in representatives, the speaker expresses hisher belief about the truth of a proposition.
Examples: -
Mary’s sister’s got a red hair. -
Wilderness explorer’s GPS shows exactly where we are on the planet. With this, we’ll never be lost.
c. Commissives
Commissives include acts in which the words commit the speaker to future action, such as “promising”, “offering”, “threatening”, “refusing”,
“vowing” and “volunteering”. In other words, the speaker indicates that heshe will do something in the future.
Examples: -
I promise to love you the way you are. -
I will kill you if you move.
d. Directives
This category covers acts in which the words are aimed at making the hearer do something, such as “commanding”, “requesting”, “inviting”,
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“forbidding”, “suggesting” and so on. In other words, directives relate to speaker’s intention to ask the hearer to do something.
Examples: -
Don’t make any scratch in the paper. -
Would you do me a favor to bring my bag upstairs?
e. Expressives
This last group includes acts in which the words state what the speaker feels, such as “apologizing”, “praising”, “congratulating”, “deploring” and
“regretting”. In short, in expressives, the speaker expresses hisher feeling such as the statement of pleasure, pain, sad, like, dislike, etc.
Examples: -
I’m sorry about yesterday. Hope you were not angry with me. -
I do really apologize for being late to come to the meeting.
D. Person Deixis
In “Pragmatics”, Huang 2007: 136 states that person deixis is concerned with the identification of the interlocutors or participant-roles in a speech event. It is
commonly expressed by the traditional grammatical category of person, as reflected in personal pronouns and if relevant, their associated predicate agreements and
