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CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY
A. Object of the Study
The object of this research is a character named Miranda Priestly in an American comedy-drama movie entitled The Devil Wears Prada. This movie was
published in 2006 based on Lauren Weisbeger’s novel, and produced by Wendy Finerman Production. This movie tells about graduated student named Andrea
Sachs who gets a job in Runway. Her position as an assistant is described as a job that “a million girls would kill for”. Runway is the fashion bible for all fashion
people in New York. In the movie, Andrea has to survive working under pressure at Runway. She has a devil boss named Miranda Priestly who manage and control
the whole fashion industry. As the editor in chief, Miranda wants all the works done precisely because Runway is published regularly.
In that movie, the term The Devil refers to Miranda Priestly as a ruthless, demanding and determined editor-in-chief of Runway fashion magazine. Prada is
a high quality brand name. Therefore, The Devil Wears Prada is described as the ruthless editor-in-chief who dressed in a high quality brand or a prominent figure
in a high-fashion magazine in New York. This research is done to find out how the directive speech acts show
Miranda’s leadership style toward her subordinates. With only focusing on Miranda’s directive speech acts in that movie, the writer collected the data by
using speech acts theory under pragmatics study. The data were classified based
on its types, forms, and were analyzed using direct and indirect speech acts, politeness strategies, components of speech, leadership style theory in order to
understand how Miranda’s directives speech acts show her leadership style.
B. Approach of the Study
In conducting this research, the writer analyses all of the utterances from Miranda Priestly to find out her directive speech acts. Because the topic covers the
issue of directive speech acts, the writer decided to use pragmatics as the approach. Huang in his book also states briefly that,
Utterance-meaning, or speaker meaning as it is often called, then, is definable as what a speaker intends to convey by making an utterance. The
study of utterance-meaning normally falls under pragmatics. 2007:11
That is the reason why pragmatics is very helpful in solving the problem of this research, it is because pragmatics allows human into the analysis. Through
this approach, the speaker agrees that pragmatics can analyze the utterance- meaning, the contextual-meaning, and how the utterances are uttered from the
speaker into the listener.
C. Method of the Study
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