Agustiani, Afridah Muslimah. 2015. Illocutionary Acts of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s State Speech (A Disourse Analysis). S-1 Thesis. English Department Teacher Training and Education Faculty. Mulawarman University. Under the guidance of Dr. Phil Maria Teodora Ping, S.Pd, M.Sc, the first advisor, and Desy Rusmawati, S.Pd, MA, the second advisor.
Communication is one of the important aspects to live in this world which functions to transfer information or idea between one and another. In the communication, the tool of transferring the idea is called as a language. A language can be used to perform an act which is called as illocutionary act. It is the speaker’s meaning which can be assertive, directive, commissive, expressive and declaration. Therefore, this study aimed to analyze the speaker’s meaning in a speech which is one of the speech events where people communicate. The speech analyzed in this study was SBY’s last state speech as the President of Indonesia in August 2014.
The purposes of this study were to find the categories of illocutionary act used by SBY, the illocutionary act mostly used by SBY, and the possible explanation for the occurrence of illocutionary act mostly used by SBY. This study was a descriptive qualitative which used a content analysis and discourse analysis in analyzing the data. The data was the utterances containing illocutionary act in SBY’s last state speech of the 69th Anniversary of the Proclamation of Independence of Indonesia. This study used three theories in analyzing the data which are Searle (1979), Yule (1996), Searle and Vanderveken (1985) and Vanderveken (1990).
The findings of the study showed that SBY used assertives (79.12%), directives (9.12%), expressives (9.41%), and commissives (2.35%). Assertive was found as the illocutionary act mostly used by SBY. He used mostly assertives because the assertive function to give motivation and explanation for giving directive to people in order to keep the Indonesia’s achievements and to continue the effort done by the previous leaders in developing Indonesia, especially SBY’s effort during his presidency in 2004 to 2014. Those findings can be used as a reference for every reader such as English lecturers, English students, and the future researchers in understanding the theory of illocutionary act so that they can develop their competence in producing a meaningful sentence or interpreting the speaker’s meaning.