Revealing Main Character's Personality in Coco Movie: A study of Speech Acts

Abstract

Speech act theory is one of studies in Pragmatics. Speech acts usually deal with multiple cases. In this research, speech act theory by Austin (1962) is linked up with personality theory of HEXACO by Lee and Aston (2012). Additionally, the theory about five basic kinds of actions by Searle (1976) and theory about features of context of situation are used in this research. Employing all aforementioned theories, this study is aimed at revealing the personality of main character in Coco movie through analyzing the utterances spoken. This research deals with qualitative method. The research strategy of this study is documentary method. The researcher takes the data from Coco movie that is downloaded from http://dl.sharemydrive.xyz/get/coco-2017. The data belong to qualitative data because the data are from the main character‟s dialogues. Selected utterances of the main character (named Miguel) which contain speech acts are used to reveal his personality. The researcher collects the data with total 33 utterances. The result of this research displays that Miguel uses 4 kinds of illocutionary acts on his utterances. These kinds of illocutionary acts are representative, directive, commissive, and expressive. This research also analyzes the relation of kinds of illocutionary acts and HEXACO personality traits. The analysis shows that representative belongs to low agreeableness, low honesty-humility, and low emotionality. Directive relates to high extraversion, high conscientiousness, and high openness to experience. Commissive is linked up with high agreeableness and low conscientiousness. Expressive refers to high emotionality and high honesty-humility. Conjoining types of illocutionary acts and HEXACO personality, this research finds that Miguel is portrayed as a child with strong will, stubborn, and hard-working. Therefore, Miguel has a combination personality of low agreeableness and high conscientiousness.