Expressives Declaratives Speech Acts

26 Direct and Indirect. Aitchison 2003 states that a “direct speech act is expressed overtly by the most obvious linguistic means ” p. 103. On the other hand, according to Aitchinson 2003, indirect speech acts possesses the different syntactical traits which frequently linked to another act p. 107. In the same stance, according to Huang 2006 direct speech act is the result of a direct connection between sentence type and the speech act. Conversely, indirect speech act occurs when the sentence type is not associated with the speech act frequently performed using it p. 1005. These notions clarify how the examples mentioned in this part earlier can perform acts other than questioning in different context. The felicity conditions which are compatible with the context will decide the act performed by the utterance. So to speak, an indirect speech act is decided based on the relevant condition in the conversation. According to Searle 1975, understanding indirect speech act requires three points to be employed namely theory of speech act, certain general principles of cooperative conversation proposed by Grice and mutual background knowledge of the participants p. 169. Searle 1975 proposes a set of steps to decide the utterance speech act. These steps are the illustrations of the steps undergone by the participants as they confronted by the indirect speech act possible utterance. The three points mentioned above make clear that the indirect speech act wants the participant to derive an inference based on the utterances contextual meaning rather than the 27 conventional meaning. The steps to find the utterances primary act are elaborated below. a. Understand the fact of conversation, what the speaker said and the context as well. b. Unless the participants are opting out from the conversation, it could be assumed that the speaker is following principle of conversational cooperation c. Then, establishing a factual background information of the given context is the next step d. Take a reasonable account to that utterance. This step facilitates the move to the step 5. e. At this point, draw out an inference based on the four previous steps. f. Next, seek to find a possible condition of which fulfill an act‟s felicity condition theory of speech acts. g. The inference drawn from the steps one up to six in relation with the possible primary illocution in the contextual background is required. h. As mentioned earlier, understanding background information or the condition at which the utterance is said is crucial to decide the primary act. i. The inference from the steps seven and eight are facilitating the next move to establish the primary act of the utterance. j. At last, based on the inference from steps five and nine, the primary illocutionary force can be established by then. If the utterances linguistic traits fulfill the felicity condition, it is considered as performing a direct speech act. On the other hand, if the utterances need to go 28 through the steps above to be relevant and coherent, the utterances have performed the indirect speech act. This indirectness, according to Leech 1983, makes sure that each semantical type can perform all of the pragmatic types or speech acts p. 115.

B. Research Framework

The related theories in the previous part allow the researcher to observe the traits of the unusual conversations in the game show. Based on its interest on the ill-sequence conversation, this research employs Leech and Svartvik 1994 and Radford 1988 typology to check whether the utterances are questions. Then, Cutting‟s 2002 and Levinson‟s 1984 notions are useful to illustrate the typical conversation. The researcher is curious about the conversations made by the performers under an unusual rule. To answer the first research question, this research employs Searle‟s indirect speech act. As Leech 1983 had explained, question is associated with questioning act. When question performs act other than questioning as it is associated with, the utterance is possessing indirect speech act. To reveal the utterance primary act, this research analyzes the act using the ten steps mentioned earlier. The act performed indirectly, however, is defined by its felicity condition in the context. To answer the second research question, the researcher analyzes the sequence based on the adjacency pair. Based on Levinson 1984 and Cutting 2002, utterances sequences follow a likely pattern to happen in a conversation. It