ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS IN LETTERS TO JULIET MOVIE.

ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS
IN LETTERS TO JULIET MOVIE

A THESIS

Submitted to the English Department Faculty of Languages and Arts
State University of Medan in partial fulfillment of requirements for
The Degree of Sarjana Sastra

BY :
NELLY VERAYANTI HUTABARAT
Reg.No: 2101220007

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
FACULTY OF LANGUAGES AND ARTS
STATE UNIVERSITY OF MEDAN
2014

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

First and foremost, the greatest thanks to almighty God in heaven for his

opportunity and health given to her which enable her to completed this Thesis in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Sarjana Sastra at English
and Literature Department of Faculty of Language and Arts, State University of
Medan.
This Thesis could have not been accomplished without

guidance,

comments, suggestions, and support from several people, for which the writer
would like to extend her sincere and special thanks to




Prof. Dr. Ibnu Hajar Damanik, M.Si., the Rector of State University of
Medan
Dr. Isda Pramuniati, M.Hum., the Dean of Faculty of Language and Arts,
Vice Dean I, Vice Dean II, Vice Dean III, and all the Administrative Staff
Prof. Dr. Hj. Sumarsih, M.Pd., the Head of English and Literature
Department and Rika, S.Pd, M.Hum., the Secretary of English and

Literature Department



Dra. Meisuri, M.A., the Head of Applied Linguistic Program and also Dra.
Masitowarni Siregar, M.Ed., the Head of English Education




Prof. Amrin Saragih, M.A., Ph.D., her Thesis Adviser for advice, guidance,
and suggestions developing the idea of writing this Thesis.
Her beloved parents Drs. Beriman Hutabarat and Jonta Simanungkalit for
their encouragment, prayers, and their deepest love and for the best brother



ever Nico Fransiscus Hutabarat, Amd.Par
Her close friend Lestari Batubara, Pinta Panjaitan, and Harmit Kaur for
supporting, togetherness, best moment, and adventure during four years and




another close friend Daniel Horatio Rupert Marpaung
Her cell group SECD (Lestari, Pinta, Marini, Lita, and Novita) for the
deepest love of them and for her unforgettable sister Riahmawani Purba
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thanks for patient, attention and pray and also thanks for El-senyor (Fitri,


Josmar, Kitaman, and Rifka), SADO (Meytri and Nova)
For those who are her friends in English Literature 2010, the greatest thanks
to all of them for their motivation and supports each other that can not be
mentioned one by one. Love you all.

Medan, August 2014
The Writer

Nelly Verayanti Hutabarat

Reg.No 2101220007

iii

ABSTRACT

Hutabarat, Nelly Verayanti. Illocutionary Acts in Letters to Juliet Movie.
A Thesis. Faculty of Language and Arts. State University of Medan. 2014.

This study deals with illocutionary acts in Letters to Juliet movie. The objectives
of the study are findings the types of illocutionary acts in Letters to Juliet movie,
finding the dominant type of illocutionary acts used in movie and describing
contexts the illocutionary used. The subject of this study is Letters to Juliet movie
and the dialogue by Sophie and Charlie is taken as data. The data were collected
by browsing from internet. The data were analyzed, identified and classified based
on the five types of illocutionary acts proposed by Yule, namely: declarative,
representative, expressive, directive, commissive. The findings of the data showed
the total numbers of process from the five types of illocutionary acts were :
representative 151 (42.2%), directive 127 (35.5%), expressive 48 (13.4%),
commissive 21 (5.9%), declarative 10 (2.9%). The representative is the dominat

type of illocutionary acts used in Letters to Juliet movie. It shows that in their
conversation Charlie and Sophie most gave information and statement about long
lost lover in Verona.
Key words : Speech acts, Illocutionary acts, Movie

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT .............................................................................
TABLE OF CONTENTS ..............................................................................
LIST OF TABLE ...........................................................................................
LIST OF APPENDICES ...............................................................................

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION...................................................................
A. The Background of the Study ..................................................................
B. The Problems of the Study .......................................................................
C. The Objectives of the Study ......................................................................
D. The Scope of the Study ...........................................................................
E. The Significances of the Study .................................................................

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CHAPTER II REVIEW OF LITERATURE ..............................................
A. Theoretical Framework ............................................................................
1. Pragmatics ...........................................................................................
2. Speech Act ...........................................................................................
a. The Classification of Speech Act .................................................

1) Locutionary Act .......................................................................
2) Illocutionary Act .......................................................................
3) Perlocutionary Act .....................................................................
b. Illocutionary Act ............................................................................
1) Declarative .................................................................................
2) Representative. ...........................................................................
3) Expressive ..................................................................................
4) Directives. ...................................................................................
5) Commissive ...............................................................................
B. Mass Media .............................................................................................
C. Movie .......................................................................................................
D. Movie Script .............................................................................................
E. Letters to Juliet .........................................................................................
F. The Short Summary of “Letters to Juliet” movie ....................................

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CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHOD .....................................................
A. Research Design .......................................................................................
B. The Source of the Data .............................................................................
C. The Technique for Collecting Data ...........................................................
D. The Technique for Analyzing Data. .........................................................


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CHAPTER IV DATA AND DATA ANALYSIS .........................................
A. Data ...........................................................................................................
B. Data Analysis ............................................................................................
C. The Use of Illocutionary Acts ...................................................................

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D. Research Findings .....................................................................................

E. Discussion .................................................................................................

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CHAPTER V CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS............................
A. A. Conclusions ..........................................................................................
B. B. Suggestions...........................................................................................

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REFERENCES ..............................................................................................

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LIST OF TABLES

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4.1 Table the total number and percentage of the types of
Illocutionary acts.....................................................................................

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LIST OF APPENDICES
Appendix 1....................................................................................................
Appendix 2....................................................................................................

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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. The Background of the study
As a social beings, human needs to communicate or interact with the other
as long as they live in the world. Human usually express their feeling, thinking
and emotion through the words and expression that was spontaneously doing the
communication with each other. Human can communicate with the other by using
language which is a system of communication by sound, operating thought the
organs of speech and hearing among members of a given community (Kramsch
:1998).
Communication can be done by spoken and written language. It needs an
act to express every from of thought and feelings that the speaker’s had. But
sometimes in the process of communication the hearer could not interpret the
message from the speaker. This can be occured because different social status,
feeling, emotion and also gender (Shouse:2005). So that, speech acts are
necessary to used for helping the hearer easy to understand and catch the
speaker’s utterance by interpreting the utterance based on the context of utterance.
Speech act included locutionary act, perlocutionary act and illocutionary
act (Peccei, 1999). Locutionary act is the words the speaker uses. Perlocutionary
acts is the effect of those words on the hearer. Illocutionary acts is what the
speaker is doing by using those words , such as make statement, an offer, an
explanation, or for some communicative purpose. There are five types of
illocutionary acts; they are declarative (declaring,marrying), representative

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(affirming, conveying, claiming, denying, and etc), expressive (apologizing,
complaining, dislike, and etc), directives (advising, challenging, commanding, and
etc), and commisives (offering, promising, swearing, and etc).
Illocutionary act is the second act type based on the Peccei categorized the
speech act. It is the utterance that the speaker says to hearer in the context.
This utterance has a certain or convention force; performing act in saying
something. For example, a speaker says, “I feel hot in this room”, then the hearer
will turn on the fan or the AC. It has the implicit meaning of requesting. This
phenomenon is often found in our daily life.
Illocutionary act can make easier to the hearer to understand the meaning
of the speaker’s utterance. Sometimes even when we use the same utterance, the
hearer may understand it differently. In this case the speaker will see the reaction
of the hearer what the hearer gets message correctly.
There have been some researches related to the Illocutionary Acts, such as
Kurnia (2013) analyzed the types of the illocutionary acts and the most
dominant types of the illocutionary acts in One Piece Comic and he found that
there are all of the illocutionary acts in One Piece Comic and Representative is the
most dominant type of illocutionary act.
Faradila (2013) analyzed the types of the illocutionary acts and the most
dominant types of the illocutionary acts in The Blind Side movie and she found
that all of the illocutionary acts are available in this movie and directive is the
most dominant type of illocutionary act.

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The reason why the writer chooses Illocutionary acts to be the analyzed is
because the previous researchers analyzed illocutionary acts in comic and movie,
so the writer takes this subject studies about illocutionary act in movie. It is knows
that communication is successful not when hearers recognize the linguistics
meaning of the utterance, but when they infer the speaker’s “meaning” from it.
Actually illocutionary is the part of speech act. There are three part of speech acts.
In the writer views, it is important to make distinction between them.
The usage of illocutionary act also used in the movie because a movie is
actually a representation of the real conversation in naturally society. Making film
also has the social dimensions for several reasons. Film makers are member of
society, and, as such, are no less subject to social pressures and norms than
anyone else. Furthermore, all film making occurs within social context. This
research is focused on the illocutionary acts in Letters to Juliet Movie.
Letters to Juliet is one of the romantic drama film which is written by Jose
Rivera and Tim Sullivan. Letter to Juliet movie was released theatrically in North
America and other countries on May 14, 2010.
The writer wants to analyze the intended meaning of utterance, and also
the types, dominant types and context of illocutionary acts that produce by the
main characters are Sophie and Charlie. The writer chooses Letters to Juliet
movie as the source of data because this movie is popular and received many
awards in Teen Choice awards 2010 i.e. the best actress, musical or comedy and a
lot of people who really like the story in this movie.

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B. The Problems of the Study
The problem of the study are formulated as the following.
1. What types of illocutionaryacts are used in movie Letters to Juliet ?
2. What type of illocutionary act is dominantly uttered in Letters to Juliet
movie script ?
3. In what contexts is the dominant illocutionary act used ?

C. The Objectives of the Study
In the relation to the problems of study, the objectives of study are.
1. to describe the types of acts in movie Letters to Juliet,
2. to derive the type of act that is dominantly uttered in Letters to Juliet
movie script and
3. to elaborate contexts the dominant of act in Letters to Juliet movie.

D. The Scope of the Study
Illocutionary is what the speaker is doing by uttering those words :
commanding, offering, promising, threatening, thanking, etc. Yule (1996 : 47)
said that actions performed via utterances are generally called speech act and it is
has five types of general function such as declaratives, representatives,
expressives, directives, and commissives. In this research, this study is focused on
Illocutionary acts used in Letters to Juliet movie script.

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E. The Significances of the Study
Findings of the study are expected to offer both theoretical and practical
significance.
Theoretically the findings can
1. enrich and extend theories of speech act and
2. become references for further student.
3. Practically the findings are useful for
4. readers especially the students of English Department who want to analyze
text in terms of illocutionary acts and
5. other students who want to do some researches about illocutionary act.

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CHAPTER V
CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
A. Conclusions
Based on the data analysis it is concluded that.
1. There are five types illocutionary acts used are representative, directive,
expressive, commissive and declarative. The total of representative was
42.2%, directive was 35.5%, expressive was 13.4%, commissive was
5.9%, and declarative was 2.9%.
2. The dominant type illocutionary act used is Representative which is about
42.2%. It was resulted of the using of some verbs that was identified to
show the using of representative such as asserting, claiming, denying,
concluding, conveying, believing, describing, warning, informing,
reporting, insisting.
3. Representative becomes the most dominant type of illocutionary acts in
the movie. It implies that representative has a great role in the movie.
Sophie and Charlie mainly uses the statement of describing, asserting, and
informing about something. It means that, , in their conversation Charlie
and Sophie most gave information and statement about long lost lover in
Verona.

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B. Suggestions
In relation

to

the conclusions

suggestions

are staged as

the

following.Theoretically suggested
1. for enrichment and extend theories of speech act and
2. become references for further student.
Practically suggested for
1. readers especially the students of English Department who want to analyze
text in terms of illocutionary acts and
2. other students who want to do some researches about illocutionary act.

REFERENCES
Archer, Dawn. et al. 2012. Pragmatic:An advanced Resource Book for Students.
New York: Routledge
Cruse, Alan D. 2000. MEANING IN LANGUAGE: An Introduction to Semantics
and Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press
Faradila, Resti. 2013. The Use Of Illocutionary Act in Movie “The Blind Side”.
Journal of English Language and Literature. Volume 2 (1). 2303-3546
Kothari. C.R. 1985. Research Methodology. New Delhi: New Age International
Kurnia, Adhy. 2013. Illocutionary Acts of Luffy’s Utterances to His Addressees
in Comic One Piece. Journal of Linguistic.Volume 1 (2). 2301-5152
Kramsch, Claire. 1998. Language and Culture. New York: Oxford University
Press
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics.New York: Cambridge University Press
Newman, I and Benz, C.R. 1998. Qualitative–Quantitative Research Methodology
Exploring the Interactive Continium. New York: Board of Trustees
Peccei, Jean Stilwell. 1999. Pragmatics. New York: Routledge
Shouse, Eric. 2005. “Feeling, Emotion, Affect”. Journal of Media and Culture.
Volume 8 (6). 1441-2616
Yule, George. 1996. Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press
(http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_to_Juliet) accessed on Sep, 11th 2013
(http://www.01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsPragmatics.
htm) accessed on September, 11th 2013
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act) accessed on Januari 14 th 2014
(http:/wiki/wikipedia/moviescript) accessed on Januari, 16 th 2014
(http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media) accessed on Januari 14th 2014

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