A Study of Speech Acts: Revealing James Brown’s Personality Based on The Most Dominant Type of Illocutionary Acts that Appears within His Dialogues in Get On Up Movie

SUMMARY

           

A Study of Speech Acts: Revealing James Brown’s Personality Based on The Most Dominant Type of Illocutionary Acts that Appears within His Dialogues in Get On Up Movie; Alexs Gunawan Ario Yudo, 090110101038; 2016: pages; English Department Faculty of Humanities Jember University.

Speech acts studies can be applied in multiple cases, including revealing someone’s personality. Someone’s speech acts can be used to interpret personality because every single utterance shows the way someone thought and act. This study is found in Get on Up movie which features James Brown as the main character. This research is based on Austin’s (1962) theory about speech acts, Searle’s(1983) theory about five basic ats, Brown and Yule’s (1983) theory about context, Yule’s (1996) theory about felicity condition, and Wiggins’s (1996) theory about five personality traits.

Based on that movie, the researcher uses the selected dialogues from James Brown and his audiences. Those dialogues are gain by purposive sampling method. The researcher focuses on dialogues of James Brown in earlier career until he died. Besides, those dialogues have 3 aspects: (i) locutionary acts,  (ii) illocutionary acts, and (iii) perlocutionary acts. The main focus of analysis in this research is illocutionary acts since it contains intended meaning from someone’s utterances. Illocutionary acts in James Brown’s utterance is categorized in four type, i.e. directives, representatives, expressives and commisives. The most dominant type of illocutionary acts appearing in James Brown’s utterances is interpreted as his personality.

The goals of this study are (i) to find out the most dominant type of illocutionary acts that appears in James Brown’s utterance within the movie. (ii) to interpret the most dominant type of illocutionary acts that appears in James Brown’s utterance as his personality.

This study is qualitative research because it deals with describing rather than numerical (Mackey and Gass, 2005:162). The data in this research is documentary data which uses movie as the data. The movie shows the entire life story of the main character. The analysis is focused on James Brown’s earlier carrier until he reachs his succesfull carrier in music industry. The description contains the interpretation of his speech acts as his personality. The 50 selected utterances of James Brown are analyzed in order to find out the most dominant type of illocutionary act that appear within his utterance. The most dominant type of illocutionary act is interpreted as his personality through Wiggin’s (1996) theory of five personality traits.

The result of this research shows that directives type of illocutionary acts is James Brown’s dominant speech acts. It shows that he has a tendency in showing a show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement (Wiggins: 1996). Self-dicipline that becomes James Brown’s first trait is showed by his obedient toward the rules that he has applied for him and the whole members of the band. The second trait, act dutifully, it is represented by James Brown’s credibility in all of his jobs. The last trait is aim for achievment, this trait is clearly drawn by the effort in his music career. Based on the theory of five basic traits, those all James Brown’s traits can be categorized as high conscentious personality.