Moreover he explains that locutionary act is the basic act of utterance, or producing meaningful linguistic expression. The locutionary act can be viewed as
a mere uttering of some words in certain language, while the illocutionary and perlocutionary acts convey a more complicated message for the hearer. An
illocutionary act communicates the speaker’s intentions behind the locution and a perlocutionary act reveals the effect the speaker wants to exercise over the hearer.
b. The Classification of Speech Acts
Yule 1996: 53 classifies speech acts into five types: declarations, representatives, expressives, directives, and commissives.
1. Declarations are those kinds of speech acts that change the world via their utterance.
a. Priest: I now pronounce you husband and wife. b. Referee: You’re out
2. Representatives are those kinds of speech acts that state what the speaker believes to be the case or not. It involves statements of fact, assersations,
conclusions, and descriptions. For examples: a. The earth is flat.
b. It was a warm sunny day. 3. Expressives are those kinds of speech acts that state what speaker feels. They
express the psychological states and can be statements of pleasure, pain, likes, dislikes, joy or sorrow.
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For examples: a. I’m really sorry
b. Congratulations 4. Directives are those kinds of speech acts that the speakers use to get someone
else to do something. They express what the speakers want. They can be in form of commands, orders, requests, and suggestions. For examples:
a. Could you lend me a pencil, please?
b. Don’t touch that 5. Commissives are those kinds of speech acts that speakers use to commit
themselves to some future action. They express what the speaker intends. They are promises, threats, refusals, and pledges. For examples:
a. I’ll be back. b. I’m going to get it right next time.
Schiffrin 2005: 2 infers the speech act from three properties; the content of utterence, the force or mood of the utterence and the position of the
utterance within a conversation. 1. The content of the utterance means the proposition expressed by the utterance.
Defining what that is is not always easy. For example when a speaker says “Shut the door”. It means the speaker wants someone “Bring it about that, by
some future action, the proposition ‘The door is shut’ becomes true in the context of the physical world”. Of course it also uses background knowledge
and knowledge of the speaker to deduce the content of an utterance. It can be
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assumed for simplicity’s sake that this is possible to do – although not necessarily unambiguously so.
2.The force or mood of the utterance: This is achieved by what it is called as descriptive, prescriptive and requestive markers, which roughly correspond to
the traditional mood types declarative, imperative and interrogative. 3. The position of the utterance within a conversation. The placing of an utterance
in a conversation is important because the same content can be interpreted as different speech acts depending upon its position relative to other utterances in
the same context. This inevitably affects the understanding of the function of the utterance.
For example, take the following hypothetical conversation:
1 A: The door is shut. assert 2 B: The door is not shut. disagree
3a A: The door is not shut. concede 3b A: The door is shut. insist
This is a very crude example of how exactly the same utterance, even uttered in the space of a couple of turns, must be interpreted as performing quite different
functions in the conversation. Obviously no-one actually ever speaks with the content fully specified in this way, this is just intended to be representative; if this
conversation were to take place, it would be realized in a much more natural manner. However, it is clear that the only way one can attribute different speech
act meanings to the same utterance or the same propositional content of an utterance is by reference to the conversational context and to the order in which it
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comes in the dialogue. For example if on the performance of 3a we only consider the preceding utterance, then the act would be deemed one of agreement
rather than concession. Without some method of retaining where we are in the dialogue, we would be unable to interpret the current speech act satisfactorily.
Sinclair and Coulthard 1992 develop utterance into 14 acts; marker, statement, elicitation, check, directive, informative. Moreover they say that the
structure of speech in the classroom mostly is started by the teacher. Teacher initiation can be divided into two; dependence speech and independence speech.
Independence speech can be in form of teacher elicit, teacher inform, teacher direct, and teacher check. Teacher elicit is speech delivered by a teacher to direct
students to one topic to know whether students remember or know about the topic or not. Elicit can be done not only in pre-teaching but also during the teaching.
Teacher explanation is an utterance which is used by a teacher to give the fact, opinion or information to the students. Directive is an utterance to make students
do something. Check is the utterance used by a teacher to check whether students understand, do, or finish the work given by a teacher. Dependence speech happen
in the form of reinitiation, listing, repeat, and reinforcement. They happen depend on teacher elicit, direct. While the students’ initiative can be divided into two;
pupil elicit and pupil inform. The example of students’ elicit is when studets have difficulty and they make questions. And the example of students’ inform is when
students give information related to the topic. Verschueren 1999: 24 argues that all speech acts in any language
anywhere in the world fall into five categories:
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1. Assertives: expressing a belief, making words fit the world, and commiting the speaker to the truth of what is asserted.
2. Directives: expressing a wish, making the world fit the words, and counting as an attempt to get the hearer to do something.
3. Commissives: expressing an intention, making the world fit the words and counting as a commitment for speaker to engage in a future course of
action. 4. Expressives: Expressing a variety of psychological states, and simply
counting as expressions of a psychological state. 5. Declarations: Not expressing any psychological state, making both the
words fit the world and the world fit the words, and the point of which is to bring about a change in institutional reality.
In this study, the researcher uses only three categories of speech acts to know teacher’s power manifestation in language classroom. It is suitable with
Jumadi 2005: 9 who says that the speech acts that can represent the power manifestation of the teacher in the classroom are directives, assertives, and
expressives.
5. The Nature of English Language Teaching a. Theories of English Language Teaching
