ANALYSIS OF ILLOCUTIONARY SPEECH ACTS USED IN JENNIFER HUDSON SHOW

Speech acts are a subfield of pragmatics that studies how words are used not only
to present information, but also to perform actions. Talk shows are one example
of real life production that allows the use of illocutionary speech acts in the
conversation. This research aimed to analyze the kinds of illocutionary acts and
map the speech acts pattern in the Jennifer Hudson Show. Descriptive qualitative
method was used as the design. Data consisted of four episodes of Jennifer
Hudson Show and the data were collected using corpus linguistics approach. The
data were categorized using the Theory of Speech Acts proposed by Searle
(1979). The first finding showed that there were four kinds of illocutionary acts in
the Jennifer Hudson Show. The four kinds of illocutionary acts are assertive,
directive, commissive, and expressive. Directive with 38% is the most frequent
illocutionary act found. Followed by Assertive with a percentage of 31%.
Furthermore, expressive with 24% occupied the third place. Commissive with a
percentage of 7% became the least found. Meanwhile, declaration was not found
because the Jennifer Hudson Show was an entertaining talk show so that the
speech acts used were more in the form of questions and answers that indicated
directive and assertive. The second finding showed that there was speech act
pattern in Jennifer Hudson Show. The speech act pattern represents the tendency
that the talk show began with expressive, assertive, and expressive. This pattern
can be a possible model or guideline for starting a talk show.
Keywords: discourse analysis, illocutionary, pragmatics, speech act, talk show