ABSTRACT
Basically, people produce an utterance as an action. It means that they can do anything through utterances such as requesting, commanding, asserting apologizing, thanking etc. To express the idea, people do not only produce utterances consisting grammatical structure, but also they do an action via their utterances. Speech act is a field of linguistics which analyzes language phenomena. Speech act could be found in utterances of movie. Hence, the writer chooses film “Are we there yet’ as object of research. The language used by the main characters reflect social phenomena when they are angry, happy, sad or annoyed. In addition, the language used by the main character is simple. Yet, it has great effect to the hearer’s respond.
This research attempts to investigate the phenomena of speech acts to describe speech acts used by the main characters of “Are we there yet?” movie. The research question is how speech acts used by the main characters in the movie “Are we there yet”?
The descriptive qualitative method was used to conduct this research. This research describes and explains speech acts used by the main characters of the film. The data were taken from “Are we there yet?” movie. To analyze the data
the context of each utterances and felicity conditions are determined to know whether they are fulfilled or not. Then the data were presented and analyzed by using speech act theory proposed by John Searle namely: utterance act, propositional act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act.
Based on the findings of this study, speech acts used by the main characters’ utterances can be described as follows: Firstly, most speakers use directive in uttering words or sentences. It means that speaker asks someone else to perform an action through utterances. The form of directives is speaker’s utterances such as requesting, questioning, commanding, warning and inviting. Secondly, speaker uses commisive utterances to commit himself to the performance of action. Speaker has done an action of offering a help and threatening to listeners. He has made an obligation to himself to do an action. Thirdly, speakers use expressive to express a psychological state about the situation or state of affairs. For instance: getting pleasure, thanking, apologizing, and annoyed. Fourthly, speakers use representative to represent a state of affairs. Representative’s utterances such as affirming and stating. Fifthly, speakers use verdictive to express a value judgment or rates something. The researcher did not
find declarative in this study. In declarative, speaker has to have a special institutional in a specific context in order to perform a declarative appropriately.
Based on the findings, it is suggested to further researchers to investigate verdictive and declarative due to the speakers rarely produce an utterance which contains those types of speech acts. By investigating verdictive and declarative utterances can contribute new findings about speech act for the sake of enriching discourse studies
