An Analysis Speech Acts of Directive and Emotional Expressions in the 2016 US Presidential Debates

Abstract

A strong feeling of people can be conveyed through words in their speech acts. In the
presidential debates, the candidates tried to convince and persuade people with great ideas
followed by strong feelings in their speech acts. In everyday communication there must be an
opponent to convey a speech whether the other person understand or respond to what is being
discussed. To communicate, people usually use the same language so that what is conveyed can
be understood by the speaker and listener. But in some cases communication, the speakers can
get communication differences. Differences in communication can cause understanding errors
between the listener and the speaker in a communication. Some type of error in communication
the way to avoid such things is to learn about pragmatics related to meaning based on their social
context. Various types of patterns exist in pragmatics, including speech acts.Acts in which the
words used to make the hearers do something called directive speech acts. Therefore, in this
research the writer would like to explain thetypes of directive speech act, basic emotions, and
strategy used in the three transcripts of the 2016 US presidential debates.The debate is between
two candidates. They are President Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Here, there are
differences and similarities in their speech. Their utterances are to convince and persuade people
with great ideas that strategy used in the directive speech acts. This is interesting thing for the
writer to do the further research. There are various actions that can be analyzed through directive
speech act, such as commanding, suggesting, requesting and questioning, for basic emotion such
as, love, anger, surprise, sadness, joy and fear and strategy used in the directive speech acts.
This study focus on speech act of directive and basic emotions.A kind of speech acts is
intention of the speaker for the listener to perform something which means making the world
into the words. In addition, the speaker wants the situation to do something. In the situation in
communication, it can be seen what the speaker wants to say so what the listener does. Many
people have analyzed directive speech acts, but people are limited to the types of directive
speech acts. In this case the writer is interested in analyzing an act that is convince and persuade
people, and emotions in each directive speech acts, because emotions in the theory of public
speaking sense emotions in the utterances, so the writer studies the speech acts and emotional
expressions contained in the directive speech acts.Speech act of directiveinvolves effort by the
speaker to make a hearer to do something, the action when an utterance is produced can do
something. The action from the hearer can be seen from the context. And, the hearer expresses
what the speaker’s intention. It means that the hearer does what the speaker wants from utterance
that speaker says (Searle, 1976). And also basic emotion used to express the types based on
theory Parrot (2011).Many experts explain emotions, but the writer takes the basic emotion
classified by Parrot (2001). In the primary emotions there is not only anger, love, surprise,
sadness, fear and joy, but there are many classifications according to parrots, where there are
secondary emotion and tertiary emotion.
The kind of research used descriptive qualitative method. Source of data was downloaded
in the website of Washington Post and video was downloaded on Youtube. Technique of
collecting data carried out in a way : (a) watched the videos many times, read the three
transcripts and searched types of utterances, (b) crosschecked data to the videos to see the
context and transcripts, (c) uses headset and listen carefully very utterances which have types of
directive form, (d) identifies the speech act whether the data is form types of speech act directive
utterance and direct and indirect. Technique of analyzing data carried out in way : (a) analyzing
and describing the data, (b) the analyzing basic emotions and strategy used in the directive
speech acts based on explanation and description the data, (c) concluding the result of the data
analysis. And technique of presenting data analysis used informal method, is the way used by
own analysis.
Based on findings and discussion, the writer found types of directive speech act used in
the whole presidential debates candidate (first, second and third debates). Many found the
directive speech act in the script debates in utterances candidates, in each types of directive
speech acts the found various form of utterance, such as: commanding, suggesting, requesting
and questioning, found basic emotion used in directive speech act such as; joy, sadness and anger
and there are strategy used in the directive speech acts in the three transcripts of the 2016 US
presidential debates. After that, there are some contexts found in the utterances between Donald
Trump and Hillary Clinton are social contexts and epistemic contexts. From the results of
discussions and findings the writer found the types of directive speech acts are that covers speech
act of commanding, suggesting, requesting and questioning. In addition to that, a number of the
basic emotions expressed in each of the speech acts, for example strong feeling of Joy, Sadness
and Anger; then the strategies used in directive speech acts were direct strategy and indirect
strategy. From the data found, the writer differentiates the types of each speech act of directive
used by the presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Trump is more dominant
in using the speech act of commanding; and, the basic emotions is mostly expressed refers to Joy
as primary basic emotion that refers to optimism; Anger in terms of irritation, and Sadness in
terms of sympathy. For further research, the study can be developed in terms of words use as
representative of social value and politeness principles.
Keywords: speech act of directive, types, basic emotions, strategy