16 Wishes Movie Analysis

It cannot be denied that pragmatics is a branch of linguistics, which studies the language use in communication. Leech (1983) had shown that "we cannot really understand the nature of language itself unless we understand pragmatics". From pragmatic perspective, we do things by uttering words. According to Yule (1996), the act being performed via utterances is called a Speech act. And, utterances also occur in a movie in which the conversation happens among the characters. In this essay, I choose 16 Wishes movie to be analyzed speech acts and then be classified into types of speech acts.
The targeted sample of discourse in this essay is some conversation extracts from 16 Wishes movies. This movie tells the story about a 16 year old (Abby Jensen)

It means that “when saying something, we DO something”. For example, in this movie, when Miss Duffy, Abby’s teacher, says “Late again Jensen” (1), it means that the teacher declares and warns Abby. Through the example above as well as in speech act theory, it is understood that utterances relate to speech acts include locutionary acts, illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts. While locutionary act refers the literal meaning of utterance or “what is said”, illocutionary act means the extra meaning of the utterance produced on the basis of its literal meaning or “what is done”. And it is obviously that we do not simply create an utterance with a function without intending it to have an effect (Yule, 1996, p.48). This is the perlocutionary act and depending on the circumstances, speaker will hope hearer or listener recognize the effect intended. Besides, there is a general classification system lists six types of general functions performed by speech acts following the theory of Searl (1969), namely commissive, directive, declarative, expressive, representative and phatic

Especially, “Oh, Bob.” presents expressive of speech act. Expressive is a speech act in which speaker expresses their feelings and attitudes about something, like complaint, compliment, apology or thanking and so on. And, “Oh, Bob” is a way of greeting. Besides, Sue also uses representative speech act which describes states or events in the world “The party lights, they’re in the garage.” She wants to inform where the lights are. While, with the sentence “I’m on it”, it is a promise of Bob that he will get them. In speech acts, it is generally known as commissive that commits the speaker to doing something in the