THE ANALYSIS OF SPEECH ACTS ON PETER MORGAN’S MOVIE SCRIPT THE QUEEN

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 do an action via their utterances. Speech acts is a term of linguistics which analyzes language phenomena. Speech acts can be found in utterances of movie. Therefore, the writer chooses movie script ”The Queen” as the object of research. The language used by main characters reflects social phenomena when they are angry, happy, sad, or annoyed. In addition, the language produced by main characters is simple, yet it has great effect to the hearer’s respond. This research aims to analyze speech acts on Peter Morgan’s movie script The Queen directed by Stephen Frears, written by Peter Morgan, and starred by Helen Mirren as the queen Elizabeth II and then Michael Sheen as the youngest Prime Minister as main characters in this film. The story is about how to deal with the death of Diana. The Royal Family while on their summer residence at balmoral castle see her death as a private affair, not to be treated as an official Royal death. In contrast with newly appointed Prime Minister (Tony Blair) and Diana , s ex-husband (Prince Charles) who attempt to reflect the public wish for an official expression of grief. This research focuses on analyzing what kinds of speech acts on dialogues of main characters that occur on Peter Morgan’s movie script The Queen dealing with what are the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary act produced by main characters on Peter Morgan’s movie script The Queen and what is the most dominant illocutionary acts produced by main characters on Peter Morgan’s movie script The Queen. In analyzing the scenes, the researcher uses Austin and Searle theory of speech acts. The research employs a descriptive qualitative method. The research design applied in this thesis is qualitative since the data of this research are utterances, and the analysis and the result are not presented in numbers or statistic. The research is descriptive research as it tries to describe the speech act phenomena. Then, the data of the research are taken from selected dialogues among the scenes as main data on Peter Morgan’s movie script The Queen. There are 25 scenes as main data in this research. The data are devided into scene and the scene is explained into a speech act analysis. The result of the discussion reveals that many kinds of speech acts produced by main character’s utterances namely Elizabeth and Prime Minister. The study finds 25 scenes (the utterance being uttered by the character), the illocutionary acts consist of Directives appear 14 times; Assertives occur 8 times; Expressives gets 2 times; Commissives appear 1 times, and Declarative is not found in this analysis, besides there are 5 perlocution as the effect of the locutionary acts. Directives appear as the dominant speech acts imply the utterances fit the reality. This can be an indication of the characters expressing his feelings of getting the addressee to do something for instance advising and commanding. The discussions presented in this thesis highlight the analysis of speech acts on Peter Morgan’s movie script The Queen. More specifically, the aim is to determine the role of the speech acts in the comprehension of Peter Morgan’s movie script The Queen.