Pragmemic Triggers in the Acehnese Commensality

Abstract

Food is one of the ways through which humans make meaningful connections and hospitality with each other. Commensality is one of the social events of people to eat together that involves linguistic acts from the public to the intimate. The Acehnese culture in commensality is the way to honor guests by inviting them to eat together to show the host’s hospitality. This qualitative study is about the Acehnese language use functions in commensality. In this study the linguistic formula called ‘pragmemic triggers’ by Beeman (2014) was applied. Pragmemic triggers are speech acts which move the participants by stages through the ritual process and back to the external world that they accomplish social action. The result indicates eight stages with seven transitions between stages and seven pragmemic triggers that initiate these transitions which have the same structure and use based on the pragmemic triggers formulas by Beeman (2014). However, the act of commensality is transformative of social relations as the way to make connections between one another.   Keywords: Pragmemic Triggers, Acehnese, Commensality, Foo