Why brother gonna go first?
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4. Didn’t you hear?
Brad proposed a question to ask Colin about hearing the crisis. However, since Colin was asking Brad earlier, the answer was obvious that Colin was not
hearing a thing about the Godzilla. Assuming that Brad was trying to be cooperative, his remark should be intended to be relevant. However, his remark
was not one of this. The primary act therefore must be different from the literal one.
Colin knew that information of a crisis such as this should be announced throughout the town. It was a bit ignorant for him to not know anything about it
and Brad just said that it had been heard by a lot of people already. A preparatory condition for a confirming act was that the speaker believes the truth of the
propositional content. Thus, Colin might be aware that Brad was saying that a lot of people had known about it and it was becoming a crisis in the town. In the end,
Brad‟s illocutionary force was to confirm that the Godzilla was really there. In the second analysis above, there were two utterances with act of
questioning. However, the first utterance, which was recognized as a greeting based on the felicity condition, was understood as a question by Brad causing him
to utter the utterance 2. The utterance 2 was intended to be a pre-sequence, which prepare the participants for the next utterance or what utterance to follow.
However, as Colin was not aware about the Godzilla condition here, he asked a question about Godzilla. He said the utterance 3 to get the clarification about
Godzilla approaching the town. This utterance then was confirmed by the utterance 4 which also in form of question. Despite of the sequence between
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utterances 2 and 3, it was organized as a well-arranged conversation based on Cutting and Levinson common trait of a conversation. Moreover, the new
conversation started by Colin was still relevant which mainly talked about Godzilla and the change was also the result of the contextual condition.
Both analyses in this part were based on the Cutting and Levinson notion of conversation in which each participant has allocated time to speak by turn-
taking model. Based on the analysis, the participants are also playing role in negotiating their speaking allocation in the conversation. This research focus,
which was the question-question sequence in the conversation, was explained there as well. The analyses implied that the act sequences were not only question-
question. Since the speech acts of the utterances in the conversation were so various and not only act of questioning, most of the sequences were set according
to adjacency pair. As this research follows Levinson notion on conversation, the sequence of
the act was analyzed to understand the conversation itself. The conversation sequences bound was placed in the level of act. Since the speech acts illocutionary
act can be performed through various locutionary acts, the notion about form-to- force relation was no longer relevant. The analysis above showed that regardless
of its form, which is interrogative with act tendency of questioning, it actually performed other act in the context and it is possible.
The sequence was not an XXX sequence. As the question was identified as performing act of questioning, which later is symbolized as X, the conversations
would be considered as ill-sequence conversation. According to Sadock 2004,
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an act can be performed through different linguistic expression and this was proved in the first part finding, which suggests that the act sequences were not
question-question. Even though some pairs were including question-question, it was meant to be an insertion which had its own pair in between the macro pair.
Insertion was a way used by the speaker to negotiate their turn in a conversation. Therefore, the conversations sequence was not ill for the questions perform a
various act in the context.
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