CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, the researcher describes the background of the study, the

problem of the study, the objective of the study, the limitation of the study, the

significance of the study and the definitions of key terms.

1.1 Background of Study

Every person needs to communicate in order to survive and exist in life.

Communication becomes the main part in life. Human beings use a language as the

way to communicate. A language makes people enable to have more interactions

with others, to convey their ideas, feelings, or thoughts. In their communication,

people sometimes make mistakes which may lead to a misunderstanding. For an

instance, people in EFL country tend to have more mistakes in their communication

as Enxhi (2012) mentioned in her study, Malaysians are unable to speak fluently

and communicate effectively in the English language as most Malaysians do not

speak English as their first language. She found out some mistakes such as speech

disfluencies and mispronunciations among undergraduates of a Malaysian

university. Results show that the types of disfluency that occur are filled pauses,

repetitions, substitutions, insertions, articulation errors, stuttering, and false starts.

Mispronunciations are very common; however, the occurrences of

mispronunciations are predictable as they support the Theory of Language Transfer,

which makes it easier to understand the reason behind the mispronunciations.

The previous research shows that people are common to make mistakes in their

communication. Hinner (2017) has studied about other common problems and

mistakes in communication. He researched about the causes and the solutions of

misunderstanding in regard of intercultural differences. He mentioned that people

may intend a particular meaning with a specific message, but their counterpart may

attach a different meaning to that message which then results in misunderstandings

which could then actually lead to a conflict. Culture can be one of the causes for

such misunderstandings and conflicts. He concluded that it is apparent that

awareness and monitoring one’s own behavior and communication as well as that

of one’s counterpart are important elements which can help reduce

misunderstandings and misperceptions because they consider knowledge that is

required for effective communication.

The common mistakes people usually have in their communication can be not

a big problem, because the essence of communication is what the speaker says can

be understood by the hearer. In other words, there must be a connection between

what is said by the speaker and what the hearer’s understanding or interpretation.

As long as the hearer get the meaning of what the speaker says, the communication

is completed. According to Yule (2010: 127), “Communication clearly depends

not only on recognizing the meaning of words in an utterance, but recognizing what

speakers mean by their utterances.”

The mistakes a speaker has in his or her communication may be just a minor

that give no problem to the hearer. But a major mistake can give more serious

problem of misunderstanding. Therefore, people need to express and convey their

intention clearly in order to avoid misunderstanding. That is the importance of

speech act in communication. Speech act is the action performed by a speaker

within an utterance. The inappropriate use of speech act in communication may lead

to a misunderstanding. Nuraini (2015) in her research mentioned a problem in the

use of speech acts in English classroom. She argued that the use of speech acts in

Indonesian EFL class leads to a misunderstanding due to the inappropriate use of

the speech acts uttered. Students may have different interpretations of a simple

utterance said by the teacher. This is caused by the failure of using Illocutionary

Force Indicating Devices or deciding to use either direct or indirect speech acts in

certain situation. Another prove of the significant role of speech act is in the

research of Enyi (2016), he concluded that from different speech acts can have

different perlocutionary effects. He also said that deciding to use certain speech acts

classification is affected by certain factors. For example, government officials

giving political speeches may decide to use more assertive, expressive, and

commissive acts to gain people attention and persuade people in order to achieve

their goals.

The meaning as well as the speech act in the communication is very important

and thus need to be studied more specifically. Speech act is one of the elements in

pragmatics study. Before discussing about speech act in more detail, it is needed to

know more about pragmatics. Studying about language is closely related to the two

branches of language study, semantics and pragmatics. Both of that sciences

concern about language but in different sides. Semantics refers to the construction

of meaning of language, while pragmatics refers to the meaning construction in

specific context. In other explanation, semantic is a study of word meaning and

sentence meaning without any relation to context whereas pragmatics also means

as the study of meaning use or meaning interaction (Mullany, 2010: 11).

Pragmatics studies about the speaker’s meaning. In other words,

pragmatics is a study about the meaning of the context between the speaker

and hearer. In pragmatics, the hearer not only understand the meaning of the

speaker’s utterances, but the hearer also understands the context for interpreting

an utterance. Context is the thing that makes semantics and pragmatics different at

their basic. For some people, learning about pragmatics is more challenging than

the other sciences of linguistic. It is because in pragmatics we study not only

about languages but also learn about the external meaning of sentences or

utterances. “This type of study necessarily involves the interpretation of what

people mean in a particular context and how the context influences what is

said.”( Yule, 1996: 3).

Pragmatics consists of many types of studies, context, deixis, reference and

inference, anaphora, politeness, speech act etc. In the first place is about context.

According to Yule (2010:129) “there are different kinds of context. One kind is

described as linguistic context, also known as co-text. The co-text of a word is the

set of other words used in the same phrase or sentence.” The word book is

homonym, a single form with more than one meaning. We can identify which

meaning is intended in a particular sentence by the linguistic context. If the word

book is used together with words like school, study, or read, of course we should

know what type of book which is meant. If the word book is used with words like
hotel, table or seat, of course it means a reservation instead of a book to read.

According to Mey (1993: 83), “context is the surroundings that enable the

participants in the communication process to interact, and that make the linguistic

expressions of their interaction intelligible. “

Another important subject in pragmatics is politeness. Politeness is anything

about being polite or impolite to other people. This politeness is really important to

know, we may experience a situation, in a certain condition, saying good things

may end up bad things. By being polite we can have good interaction and by being

impolite will result in having bad interaction. This is the next level of using

language in communication, after using literal meaning in context and implicit

meaning in speech act.

These elements of pragmatics study: context, deixis, reference, inference,

anaphora, are ways of interpreting the meaning of an utterance literally, what people

say is exactly what they mean. Sometimes people say something but they mean

something else. For example:

Adi: Do you know what time it is?

Budi: Yes I know.

Here, we know that Budi understands the utterance spoken by Adi since Budi

answers. But what Adi means is actually he wants Budi to tell what time it is. What

is performed by Adi is requesting action rather than questioning action. And

generally we are already get used to this kind of utterances, thus we can recognize

the type of action performed by the speaker. According to Yule (2010:133) we use

the term speech act to describe actions such as “requesting,” “commanding,”

“questioning” or “informing.” We can define a speech act as the action performed

by a speaker with an utterance. If you say, I’ll be there at six, you are not just

speaking, and you seem to be performing the speech act of “promising.” The study

of speech act is very important for us to be able to comprehend what message

beyond an utterance. Speech act is also decided by the language ability of the

speaker to convey a message in communication. Therefore we need to know many

types of utterances out there in order to understand the speech act clearly. As there

may be a problem when we speak with other people in a conversation, the speaker

need to interpret his or her real meaning or intention to the hearer. This speech act

will be explained in more detail in the next chapter since it is used by the researcher

as the main theory in this study.

There are many paper, journals, and researches about pragmatics and

especially concerning about speech act. Just Say “Thank You”: A Study of

Compliment is the title of an academic journal by Hessa Al Falasi, a student in

American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. This study aims at finding

out whether Arabic learners of English (Emarati Females in particular) produce

target-like compliment responses in English and whether pragmatic transfer can

occur. It is following the previous study about the same issue of Urano. A number

of contrastive studies have been conducted to compare compliment responses in

different languages and language varieties. Arabic and South African English

speakers were found to prefer accepting compliments rather than reject them.

Speakers of Asian languages, on the other hand, were likely to reject compliments

(Urano, 1998). It is very interesting findings, that the action of expression “Thank
you” is to compliment, thus simply expecting reply such as “You’re welcome!”

But then some people are likely to reject them for example by replying “It’s not a

big deal, so no need to say thanks.

“Speech Act of Greeting for American Native Speakers of English and

Saudi Native Speakers of Arabic” a research by Rehan Almegren (2017). The

findings derived from collected data point to the fact that both the native English

and Arabic speakers showed confidence while interacting with someone from

lower social status which in turn increased the number of words uttered by them.

The usage of oral greetings strategies was largely similar between the groups.

Similarities between the groups were also mainly in the use of terms of address

and initiation words. Social status was found to have a higher impact on the usage

of greeting strategies by the Saudi native speakers of Arabic respondents compared

to the American native speakers of English. Moreover, it was found that the

increase in formality level reduced the confidence level of the speakers from both

groups and a similar situation was evident in case of the social distance. For

instance, Nickerson (2000) adds that the economic situation influences language

choice in corporate communication.

In 2012, Sanaa Ilyas and Dr. Qamar Khushi from Pakistan, had a research

entitled Facebook Status Updates: A Speech Act Analysis. The researchers aim at

studying the communicative functions that emerge from analysis of the status

updates from 60 males and females. The analysis reveals that expressive speech

acts take the biggest portion of all speech acts types in Searle’s taxonomy due to

the fact that Facebook is mostly used to express feelings and ideas.
 In 2017, Indonesian students from Udayana University, I Gde Pasek

Kamajaya, Ni Kt. Alit Ida Setianingsih and Ni Made Suwari Antari had a research

entitled Illocutionary and Perlocutionary Acts in the Movie Script Entitled

“CBGB”. Like the communication in daily life, the conversation performed by the

characters based on the movie entitled CBGB has a complex way in Conveying

their purpose through the utterances. Some of them used direct form to express

their purpose, while the other prefer to speak by means of something else or

indirectly. Based on the findings and discussions, the illocutionary acts found in

the movie involved all the types of the illocutionary acts based on Searle’s theory.

They were including representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, and

declarations.

Here the researcher will study and analyze the speech act of a movie

dialogues in the form of a script. Recently a movie is considered as one of the

most popular entertainment. Many people like watching a movie, we can find

many values for us such as education values or moral values. Related to this study,

not all of the audiences understand the dialogues in the movies, the meaning and

the intention of every utterance in the dialogues. Therefore, the researcher will

study the script of “21 Jump Street” movies by Phil Lord and Chris Miller to

study, analyze, and to find the kinds of speech act.

1.2 The Problem of Study

In line with the background of the study, the problems of the study can be

formulated as follows:
1. What kinds of speech acts used in “21 Jump Street” movie script?

2. What are the illocutionary forces/ types in “21 jump Street” movie script

based on Searle category?

3. How does the perlocutionary acts work based on each illocutionary act found
in 21 Jump Street” movie script?

1.3 Objective of the Study

Based on the problem of study, the research purposes are:

1. To find out the types of speech act used in “21 Jump Street” movie script.

2. To know the illocutionary act that found in “21 Jump Street” movie script

based on Searle category.

3. To know how the perlocutionary acts work based on each illocutionary act

found in 21 Jump Street” movie script.

1.4 Significance of Study

There are two kinds of significant study, those are theoretical and practical

study. Theoretically, the researcher expects to enrich the knowledge of speech act.

The researcher expects that this study is able to contribute in English studies

material, especially in giving description about speech act. Practically, this study

may help the reader to have deeper understanding for speech act occurred in the

communication between speaker and listener. This study will be another more

reference to study speech act and it can be used as additional knowledge in

sociolinguistics, pragmatics and other parts of language study. The result of this
research can be used as one of the references and information for further researcher

related with the field

1.5 Limitation of Study

The researcher analyzes speech acts taken from “21 Jump Street” movie

script. In this discussion to limit the analysis the researcher focuses on the types of

speech act and the illocutionary act (force) in the movie script

1.6 Definition of Key Terms

In order to avoid misunderstanding, the researcher gives definition of key

term which is used in this study, they are as follows:

Speech act is the action performed by a speaker with an utterance. Speech

act performs when people make utterances such as greeting, asking,

complimenting, requesting, apologizing, etc.

21 jump Street is a 2012 American action comedy film directed by Phil

Lord and Christopher Miller, starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. The film

follows two police officers who are forced to relive high school when they are

assigned to go undercover as high school students to prevent the outbreak of a new

synthetic drug.

Movie Script is the written text that used in a movie.