The study of speech acts in Dawson's Creek tv serial

Yap, Melda (2001) The study of speech acts in Dawson's Creek tv serial. Bachelor thesis, Petra Christian University.

Abstract

Speech acts play an important role in human?s interaction because when we say something, we do not deliver only the meaning of the utterance but also the intended meaning beyond it. We can find speech acts in daily conversation even in a TV serial. The writer is interested in analyzing speech acts on TV serial because TV serial presents complete forms of speech acts. This study uses Searle?s speech acts theory as well as Hurford and Heasley to investigate the conversations used by Dawson's Creek serial. She also uses Hymes? context of the situation to determine the propositional meaning and the illocutionary act. She used Internet web side to search the script. The data was divided into scenes and then described the scene based on context of the situation. She identified speech act utterances of the conversations produced by the characters to analyze the propositional meaning and the illocutionary act then the results were put into a table. The writer found that most of the utterances in Dawson?s Creek serial had propositional meanings except three utterances bye, hello, and hi that categorized as non propositional meaning. A variety of illocutionary acts occurred in this film such as apologizing, complimenting, complaining, assuring, advising, etc. In this case, context of the situation played a significant part to determine the propositional meaning and the illocutionary act.

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