THE INTERPRETATION OF ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS IN TITANIC MOVIE

Abstract

Illocutionary act refers to the speaker’s intention to communicate with the listener. In illocutionary act, a speaker utters some phrases or sentences with some intentions in his/her mind. This study uses Titanic movie as the object. It discussess the types of illocutionary act and their communicative intentions used by Jack and Rose as the main characters in the movie. Both Jack and Rose tend to utter their utterances with some intentions. It causes the appearance of some confusing utterances in Titanic movie. This study applies qualitative (documentary method) as the research strategy. The script of the movie is taken from an internet website, http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Titanic.html. The data are accessed on September 18th, 2013 at 10 a.m. The writer only takes the utterances that contain illocutionary acts uttered by Jack and Rose. Searle’s theory of five types of illocutionary act (in Leech, 1983:105) is applied to analyze the data. Those types are assertive, directive, commisive, expressive and declarative. The results show that both Jack and Rose use all the types of illocutionary act in their utterances. They mostly use assertive by the act of stating, directive by the act of requesting, and also commisive by the act of promising.