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CHAPTER IV RESEARCH RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
This chapter elaborates this research result and findings required to answer the research questions. This chapter consists of two parts which represent the
number of the research question. Its first part focuses on discussing the indirect speech acts through the utterance in the conversation. The second part elaborates
the act sequence which performed through the utterances which are in form of question. The discussion is expected to reveal the coherence and relevance of the
conversation apart from its ill-sequence resemblance.
A. The Primary Acts of utterances in Question Only Game as Analyzed
Using Searle’s Indirect Speech Acts
This first part would address the first issue of this research interest in the Questions Only
game. As Huang 2006 and Leech 1983 point out that sentence type interrogative, among other sentences types, is recognized as performing act
of questioning. Since then, the game is assumed to have an ill-sequence conversation. As well adjacency pair suggests, question must be followed by an
answer. The conversations are, therefore, assumed to be irrelevant and incoherent since no participants give answer to the questions.
Based on Leech and Svartvik 1994 and Radford 1988 typology, there are five types of questions namely yes-no question, wh-question, tag question,
echo question, and another type of question including ellipsis and raising
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intonation. The researcher found that there were 252 utterances categorized as question. The numbers for each category were explained in table 4.1 below:
Table 4.1 Utterances Appearances Based on Its Type
No. Type of Question
Number of Appearances
Percentages 1.
YesNo 148
58,73 2.
WH-question 59
23,41 3.
Tag question 4.
Echo question 2
0,79 5.
Another type of question 1
17,06 - Ellipsis
29 - Raising intonation
13 Total
252 100
By observing the data which consists of all questions, it can be concluded that the conversations are having ill-sequence.
This research was addressing the notion about question-answer pair sequence. An answer was assumed to be in form of declarative sentence. There
was believed that the utterances syntactical form was responsible for binding the conversation coherency. However, there are some objections to the notion. First is
that answerhood is a complex property composed of sequential location and topical coherence across two utterances Levinson, 1984: p. 293. It is not easily
determined by the utterances type. Moreover, Levinson 1984, Coulthard 1977, as well as Labov and Fanshel 1977 state that the coherency of a conversation
sequence does not lie on the sentence category. In addition, Levinson 1984 suggests going deeper into the
“level of speech acts to make the sequence described straightforwardly
” p.289.