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Tell me why we should go from here Imperative form functioning as an assertion: why should we go from here?
Who cares?
Interrogative form functioning as an assertion: no one cares.
Can you turn on the fan for me? Interrogative form functioning as a request: turn on the fan for me
From those examples above, it can be concluded that not every form sentence functioning as it is, but also can be used for any other purpose. Such examples show
us that indirect act is carried out when the form of the sentence used by the speaker is not appropriate to the intention of the speaker. A speaker may utter in an interrogative
sentence, but the meaning or the intention is to make an act of requesting and so on.
3.3.3. Literal act
When listening to someone’s utterance or sentence, a listener sometimes finds that is very easy or hard to understand what the speaker wants in his utterance. When
a speaker means what he says or he does not have the hidden the meaning, it is called literal meaning. Its meaning is indicated by the literal reading of the grammatical form
and the vocabulary of the sentence. See the example below:
My mother is very beautiful
I have two sisters The entire sentences above are literal as long as the speaker means lexically
and uttered in a normal context and all the sentences contain literal direct act. They are easily to understand since there is no other context that influences to change the
meaning.
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3.3.4. Non Literal Act
The meaning is non literal if a speaker means something different what the words mean. When someone utters a non literal utterance, the hearer may got hard to
find the exact meaning. See the examples below:
Her voice makes me sleepy
His song makes me hungry The entire sentences contain non literal meaning, since they does not mean the
lexical meaning, there must be another meaning out of the lexical meaning. In case, to understand the sentences clearly, the reader has to know the contexts and the situation
where, when, by who and to whom they are uttered.
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4. THE ANALYSIS OF DIRECTIVE ILLOCUTIONARY ACT 4.1. Syntactic Features of Directives
As mentioned in the previous chapter, Directives are defined as part of illocutionary acts in which the speaker is attempting to get the hearer to do something.
In this thesis, the writer analyzes the utterances of the main character in the movie the pursuit of happiness, Chris Gardner, and it will be categorized into directives only.
Searle 1969 observes that this class may have certain syntactic feature in that one can characterize and perform directives act as follows:
I verb + you + volitional verb + NP This syntactic feature of directives is in the form of performative sentence which uses
performative verb after subject of the first person singular or plural. For example:
I order you to finish your work, Jack The normal form of a request is an imperative sentence; imperative is normally
constructed with verb in the stem form without a subject, for example: 1.
Listen 2.
Give it here
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