Finally, after living as a slave for 12 years, Solomon Northup was freed and could reunite with his family.
7. Previous Studies
There have been many researches on the speech acts of refusals. One of the researches was A Contrastive Pragmatic Study on American English and
Mandarin Refusal Strategies by Chao-chih Liao and Mary I. Bresnahan. Their research finding showed that Chinese people generally do not express positive
opinions first because the expression of wo hen le-yi ‗I’d love to…‘ was not a
formulaic expression in refusals. In contrast, most of Americans refused by stating their principle. Moreover, the most common mode of refusals in Chinese was an
address form and apology followed by the reason of refusals. Otherwise, Americans would say
I’d love to followed by the reasons of refusing. A Pragmatic Analysis of Refusal Expressions Used by the Characters in
Orphan Movie by Arum Sari was another research on refusals. The research focused on analyzing refusals performed by the family in Orphan. The first
objective was to analyze the types of refusals. The finding revealed that there were two types of performed refusals, namely direct and indirect type. Indirect
type, especially avoidance, had the highest frequency in the occurrence of refusals. Most of the family characters in the movie used avoidance in order to
avoid the conflict with the interlocutor. Arum Sari discussed the strategies of refusals in her second objectives. The
finding revealed that the occurrence of negative politeness strategy was higher
than positive politeness, bald on-record, and off-record strategy. Indicating reluctance, being indirectness, using hedge, and using question were negative
politeness strategies which were employed by the family members to express their refusals.
The last objective of Arum Sari‘s research was to describe the functions of refusals. The finding showed that refusals expressed by the family members had
functions to refuse suggestion, request, and offer. This research is different
from Arum Sari‘s research. The difference lies on the second objective, the third objective, and the object of the research. The
second objective of Arum Sari‘s research was to describe the strategies in refusals by employing politeness strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson. Meanwhile,
the second objective in this research is to describe the realizations of refusals by using Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-
Weltz‘s classification of refusals. The third objective in Arum Sari‘s research was to describe the functions
of refusals. In analyzing the data, she employed a theory proposed by Edmonson. On the other hand, this research analyzes the functions of refusals by examining
the contexts, the types, and the realizations of refusals. The object of this research is a movie entitled 12 Years a Slave.
Meanwhile, Arum Sari used Orphan as her research‘s object. Since both of the
researches have different object, the findings will be different from one another.
B. Conceptual Framework
In this research, the resear cher analyzes the character‘s utterances in Steve
McQueen‘s 12 Years a Slave movie through pragmatic approach. Pragmatics is the most appropriate approach to support this research due to its concerns about
