AN ANALYSIS OF SPEECH ACT AS FOUND IN NOVEL ENTITLE DEAD MAN WALKING  FROM HELEN PREJEAN

Authors

The objectives of the study is to describe the types of directive speech act and the reason why some

of them are mostly often used by the characters in the novel Dead Man Walking. Directive speech act

refers to the words uttered to make the hearer do something. For example, requesting, commanding,

forbidding, suggesting, (Cutting, 2003). All the utterances that refer to the directive speech become data

of this study. The data wee taken from novel dead man walking. The collected data were classified and

analyzed based on the speech act theory, (Austin, 1966, Searle, 1969, Yule, 1996, and Cutting, 2003). In

conducting to this study, the writer applied qualitative method which describes and explains the data analysis

as they are using the words. From the analysis, the writer found various types of directive speech act such as

suggesting, commanding, requesting, criticizing, and warning and some types of directive speech act are

most often used. The result of this research also show that context influenced the types of directive speech

act, those are epistemic context, social context,, physical context, and linguistic context,

Keywords: speech act, directive speech act , context, Dead Man Walking