On Speech Acts

This paper is intended to give insights to the readers about development of speech act theories which include categories, characteristics, validities, and strategies. The research begins with the classification of speech acts done by some experts and continues with description of characteristics and validities carried out especially by Austin and Searle, and ends with speech act strategies developed by Parker and Riley, using examples taken from Indonesian, Javanese, Balinese, and English, four languages that the writer masters relatively well. Most of Indonesian, Balinese, and Javanese data together with their context are created intuitively as a native or nearly-native speaker while some English utterances are created and the others extracted from pragmatic text books used as references in this study. Research findings show that there are various types of speech acts, and each speech act has its own validity conditions. Among them, illocutionary acts constitute the focal point of pragmatics’ studies. The description shows that every expert of pragmatics uses different categories in classifying illocutionary acts, and the kinds of strategies used to express them.

On the other hand, various kinds of utterances can be used to perform the same speech acts.
For instance, utterances like Aku sibuk 'I am busy', Aku banyak PR 'I have a lot of homework', Pamanku akan datang 'My uncle will come', Aku Lelah sekali 'I am very tired', etc. can be used to perform an act of refusal. This paper is motivated by the increased number of students in the department of linguistics who wishes to write working papers, theses, even doctoral theses by choosing the area of pragmatics as their study objects. However, their knowledge about speech acts is still very superficial. In fact, speech acts constitute one of the profound aspects or topics discussed in this study area. In other words, it is absolutely impossible to study pragmatics without having an adequate knowledge about speech acts. The problem is getting more complicated because every linguist has different insights about speech act matters mainly concerning its category, classification, and strategy. Accordingly, this paper wants to briefly discuss about this matter using cases or examples found in four languages the writer adequately and sufficiently masters, i.e. Indonesian, Balinese, and Javanese, and English through instances exemplified by the text books used as references. The discussion will focus on three main aspects: speech act category, speech act classification, and speech act strategy. This study will hopefully complete the speech act studies that have been carried out by several scholars so far, such as a research done by Tutuarima et al. (2018: 122-131) concerning the way speech acts are expressed, their classification and the dominance of directive and expressive speech acts found in the movie entitled "London Has Fallen". Basra & Thoyyibah (2017: 73-81) conducted a research on the classification of speech acts used by EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers and recommended the use of directive speech acts dominantly among any other ones in foreign language teaching activities. Praditya et al. (2014: 1-10) investigated the use of speech act categories found in the conversations between Habibie and Ainun in the film entitled Habibie and Ainun (2012).
Without any clear reason, the research finding shows that the use of representative speech acts is the highest in number compared to the other categories. Focusing on research seminar interlocution, Kamariah (2017: 145-178) found the questioning and answering acts as the dominant category in such type of occasion. Syah et al. (2017: 300-315) concentrated their study on the use of various directive speech act subcategories and their strategies found in one of TV One's talk show program "Satu Jam Lebih Dekat". The study is able to reveal many kinds of directive speech act subcategories, such as pleasing, requesting, asking, etc., and the strategies used to perform the acts covering bald on record, positive and negative, and bald off record as well.
Traditionally, language, the human verbal means of communication, is used by the speaker to say something in order to make the other person or individuals understand what they intend to communicate. However, in the more contemporary linguistic theories, new insights about language use have developed. Scholars nowadays view that a language is not merely used for saying or communicating something but can also be elaborated for doing something or affecting someone. All of these three aspects are respectively labelled locution, illocution, and perlocution, and consequently, there are three types of acts, i.e. locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act (Parker, 1986;Austin, 1962) that might exist in any verbal locution. The intention (external meaning) delivered through locutionary act is the easiest to identify, one through illocutionary act is more difficult, and one through perlocutionary is the most difficult.
Nonetheless, in the development of speech act theory, all languages' linguistic uses are intended to perform different acts in different speech situations (Parker and Riley, 2012, 32) in which stating and asserting are included in one type of illocutionary acts.
In pragmatic theory, one kind of speech act can be performed by various types of utterances and contrarily one type of utterance can be used to express many kinds of speech acts.
For example, in Indonesian, a speaker with the intention of asking someone to bring a drink can utter Saya haus sekali 'I am really thirsty'; Tolong, aku dibawakan minuman 'Help me, to bring me a drink'; Wah, saya lelah sekali sampai berkeringat jalan 10 km 'Oh, I am very tired, my body is sweaty after having walked for 10 kilometres'; Kowe isa njupukke aku wedang 'Could you bring me a drink'; etc. Meanwhile, the Indonesian utterance Saya mengantuk 'I am sleepy', depending on its contextual situation, can be used to mean 'I will go to have some sleep', 'You may go home now', 'I want you to make me a glass of coffee', 'We'd better stop the discussion now', etc. This fact indicates that the physically identical utterances may get different responses because of various speech acts they may deliver in any verbal interaction. For example, the Javanese utterance Iki jam piro? 'What time is it? can be answered 'It is seven o'clock' if it is uttered by someone who needs information about time. It can also be responded by Ya, aku tak does not get any response if it is uttered by a boarding house owner to a boy who, until too late at night, was still visiting his girlfriend.
Therefore, based on the discontinuities of the speaker's utterance and the utterance used to respond to the person whom they speak with, there are indications that interlocutor's speech is pragmatically underlined by various cultural assumptions shared by them. These facts show that pragmatic studies play an important role in order to comprehend better verbal human interactions.
Pragmatic studies allow people to interpret what speakers mean in a particular context, and how the context influences what is said.
This study also helps to understand how listeners can make inferences from what is said in order to arrive at an interpretation of the speaker's intended meaning (Yule, 1996: 3). As far as the inferences are concerned, they must involve the ability of the speakers to identify what kind of speech act the speaker utters or intend to imply in every interlocution, or what kind of act the interlocutor performs in every utterance delivered in a given interaction.

RESEARCH METHOD
Utterances exemplified in this paper are obtained from various languages. Indonesian examples are created intuitively from my ability to use this language as my native and national language which I use in various occasions, mainly in formal situations or in communicating with ones who do not master Javanese and Balinese in informal speech situations. As a native speaker of Indonesian, I actively master this language both written and oral, and I am able to produces unlimited utterances. Based on this proficiency, the Indonesian data together with its contextual usage are intuitively created. The same procedure is carried out in creating Balinese utterances while the Javanese data collecting procedure is slightly different. The grammaticality of Javanese created data are first tested empirically with some Javanese speakers. Some of English utterances are created intuitively with the help of English Dictionary (Hornby, 2015) and Indonesian-English Dictionary (Echols and Shadily, 2003), and the others are taken from pragmatic and sociolinguistics text books used as references. To identify what kind of speech act the utterances perform, they are analyzed using contextual methods by perceiving the addresser and addressee, spatiotemporal setting of the interlocution, and other possible speech situations. All data are presented in orthographical transcription.

RESULTS & DISCUSSION
The following sections will respectively discuss more detail about various kinds of speech category, their linguistic characteristics and validity conditions, and strategies used to deliver.

Speech Act Category
Speech act concerns with any kind of act possibly performed by language speaker when delivering utterance. With regard to its category, it can be classified on the basis of two criteria, i.e. focus and function of speech act. These two criteria will be described in the following sections.

Speech Act Classification Based on Focus
Speech act can be differentiated based on its focus into three types. If a speech act is focused on the utterance delivered by the its speaker, it is called locutionary act (the act of saying something). In this matter, the act performed is identical with the meaning and mode of the utterance used to express. Consider for example the following Balinese sentences: Da jemaka pipis tiyange! 'Do not take my money', Nyen nyemak pipis tiyange 'Who took my money', Ake sing nyemak pis caine 'I did not take your money', etc. For expressing locutionary acts, these sentences are respectively used to say command, i.e. to forbid someone from taking the speaker's money; to ask someone for seeking information about anybody who has taken his money; to inform the addressee that he did not take the addresser's money. These three utterances have the same intentions with the modes of the sentence used to express, and the meaning of lexical items used to construct the utterances have the same meaning with what the speaker intends to.
Therefore, locutionary acts have the least pragmatic impact in the interlocutions.
Unlike locutionary act, illocutionary one is focused on the kinds of act possibly performed by the speaker of an utterance (the act of doing something). The acts being performed contextually depend on various external factors, such as who the speaker are talking to, where, when, and to what end. As such, the Balinese utterance like Ken pipis tiyange? 'where is my money' in different context of situations is doing various actions, such as questioning, asking the addressee to return the debt or loan, asking the addressee to give him a money, etc. Based on the assumption that every conversation is built by cooperative principles between the interlocutors, when the question Ken pipis tiyange? is uttered to someone borrowing the speakers' money, the illocutionary force is not questioning but, instead, directing the addressee to return the money he had borrowed. However, if this utterance is expressed to his parents who have saved the money, the illocutionary act of questioning seems more appropriate.
Finally, perlocutionary act is a speech act intended to affect anyone. An Indonesian utterance like Ayah Ani di rumah 'Ani's father is at home' might be used by the speaker to affect the interlocutor for delaying his intention to visit his girl friend. In spite of the intention to inform

Illocutionary Act as the Centre of Pragmatic Study
As mentioned above, utterances containing locutionary acts that deliver intentions which are identical to the forms and meanings the linguistic constructions used to express. Therefore, such kinds of utterance have no or very little significance to the pragmatic problems. On the other hand, perlocutionary acts are still very difficult to study for what the speakers want to affect, and how the utterances influence the interlocutors are not easy to identify. These facts bring consequence that, up till now, illocutionary acts and everything related to them are still becoming the focus of attention of pragmatic studies. The different categories of illocutionary act are based on communicative functions of the utterance. In illocutionary perspectives, every utterance contains pragmatic forces which enable the addressees to infer what the speaker is directly, explicitly, as well as implicatively doing through its utterance, instead of just saying something.
Commissives are typically used for promising, and committing one to do something. Behabitives are acts commonly used for apologizing, congratulating blessing, cursing, or challenging. Finally, expositives are ones exploited for making utterances fit into an argument or exposition.
Meanwhile, Kreidler (1998, 176-194) classifies speech act into: assertive, performative, verdictive, expressive, directive, and phatic (see also Wijana, 2010, 94-99). Assertive speech act is an illocutionary act used to tell what the speakers know or believe whose mainly function is to inform, such as I say that I voted for Aaronson in the last election, We declare that most plastics are made from soy beans, etc. Performatives are ones used to bring about the state of affairs they name. These speech acts are considered valid if spoken by appropriate people to perform the acts.
For example, the act of marrying, I pronounce you husband and wife is only valid if it is uttered by a catholic priest or other people of having right to do so. Verdictives are speech acts functioned to make judgment about the acts of the addressee, such as ranking, assessing, appraising, condoning, 'The electricity will be out from ten up to twelve'; concluding, such as Jadi, dia yang melakukan subject. With regard to Indonesian, and most of local languages in Indonesia, even the utterance should express present or future action, the verbal form might be the same because tense matters are not grammatically constructed, yet lexically by adverb of time or it is just implied. So, the Indonesian utterance such as Saya akan membaca buku itu 'I will read that book' is a performative act, while Saya sudah membaca buku itu and Dia membaca buku itu are not, even though the verbal forms do not change. In addition, because of linguistic individuality of Indonesian, and several local languages in Indonesia in which different focus of Asian languages in one hand, and western languages on the other (Dardjowidjojo, 1986, 57-70), performative utterances can be expressed in passive voice, for example Indonesian sentence Akan saya ambil buku itu, Lakar kajemak bukune ento, Arep tak jupuk buku kui which all mean 'I will take that book'. These passive sentences seem more appropriate to perform speech act than their active equivalents.
2. Besides the syntactic characteristics outlined above, in order to be considered valid or felicitous, utterances expressing performative actions should have the following sincerity and felicity conditions: a. The person and circumstances must be appropriate. For example, in order to be valid, the following Indonesian sentences Kamu keluar 'you are out', Akan saya nikahkan saudara dengan putri saya 'I will marry you with my daugther', Dengan resmi pertemuan ini saya nyatakan dibuka 'I declare that the meeting is officially opened' must take place respectively in football match, wedding ceremony, and conference or seminar by an umpire, daughter father, and university rector or faculty dean, etc.
b. All speech participants must have appropriate intentions. Without sincerity, the act of forgiving and apologizing expressed in the following Javanese utterances could be infelicitous: Ya kowe tak ngampura 'Yes I will forgive you', Sesuk aja kok baleni 'Please don not do that again', Aku njaluk ngapura, ya? 'I beg you pardon'.
c. The speakers must believe that they can perform the action. For example the Balinese utterance such as Yadyapin joh 10 kilo, tiyang lakar majalan kemu 'Although it is far about e. The speakers must predicate an act of themselves, instead of others. For example, the Indonesian utterance like Saya berjanji bahwa saya akan datang tepat waktu 'I promise that I will arrive on time', as long as it is expressed with sincere intention, constitutes a felicitous performative action because it predicates the speaker's action. However, Saya berjanji pasti dia akan datang tepat waktu 'I promise that he certainly will arrive on time' is not felicitous because it predicates the action of another person.

Speech Act Strategy
As part of rhetoric, either textual or interpersonal, pragmatics is essentially a branch of linguistics that concerns with the strategies available for the speakers to choose in different speech situations (Leech, 1983, 15). The choice of strategies is strongly influenced by various sociocultural factors and communicative intentions of the speakers to the person or people they are speaking with. Those factors can simply be measured based on three dimensional ratings, i.e. distance rating, power rating, and rank rating (Brown & Levinson, 1978;Wijana 1996, 64-66).
These three ratings are respectively determined by degree of intimacy, social and economy status of the speaker and the addressee, and emergency state of the speech act. Thus, the communicative competence the speakers have will determine which strategy they would choose in speaking with the intimates, the person of higher or lower status, as well as in conversing in formal or less formal situations. All these facts in turn will manifest various kinds of utterance with different politeness or degrees of formality representations. The various modes of utterances essentially reflect the strategy chosen by the speaker in different speech situations. The speech strategies can be classified into various categories based on several criteria. Those strategies are explicit and nonexplicit strategy, direct and indirect strategy, literal and nonliteral strategy, and expressed and implied strategy. All of these will be described as follow:

Explicit and Nonexplicit Strategy
In formal speech situation, explicit strategy is often found through Indonesian utterances like Saya menyatakan engkau bersalah 'I states that you are guilty', Saya mengakui bahwa soal itu memang sulit 'I admit that the problem is really difficult', etc. These two utterances explicitly show their performative verb, i.e. menyatakan 'to state' and mengakui 'to admit'. All of these utterances constitute explicit speech strategy. However, in less formal interactions, the first clauses are often deleted, and only the subclause uttered by the speakers, Engkau bersalah 'you are guilty' and Soal itu memang sulit 'the problem is really difficult'. The types of act represented by the formal and less formal style are the same, yet the strategies exploited are different, i.e. between explicit and nonexplicit strategy.

Direct Strategy and Indirect Strategy
Syntactically, mode of sentence can be differentiated into three categories, i.e. declarative, interrogative, and imperative. Declarative sentences are used by the speaker to declare or announce something to the addressee. Interrogative sentences are ones exploited by the speaker to ask or to seek information from the addressee. Meanwhile, imperative sentences are ones used by the speaker to order or command the addressee to do something. In case of directive utterances expressed using imperative sentence, the strategy used by the speaker is called direct strategy for there is a direct correspondence between the syntactic forms of the utterance and the kind of act wanted to be expressed by the speaker. For example, Silakan datang ke rumahku! 'Please come home' is a direct speech act if this sentence is used to invite the addressee. Apakah rumahmu di Solo? 'Is your house at Solo?' is also a direct act if it is used by the speaker to get information about the speaker's domicile. Aku punya beberapa rumah 'I have several houses' also constitutes a direct act if it is used by the speaker to give the addressee information about the number of house the speaker has.
For more polite speaking, the utterance Handukku di jemuran 'My towel is on the clothe line' and Di mana handukku 'Where is my towel' are exploited by the speaker to order or command the addressee. The speech act strategy chosen by the speaker belongs to indirect strategy for the sentence modes used to express are matched with the type of speech act the speaker intends to perform. According to Parker and Riley (2012, 38-39) utterance like And you are… is an indirect speech act strategy because the sentence is conventionally used to perform an act of questioning Who are you?. Yes-no question like Do you have time? is also considered to perform indirect illocutionary act because it is intended to represent another type of question (information question) What time is it?

Literal and Nonliteral Strategy
Generally speaking, utterances are commonly used to convey meanings in accordance with the literal meanings of the linguistic structure constructing them. For example, Javanese utterances

Journal of Pragmatics Research
Vol. 03, No. 01 (2021), pp.14-27 E-ISSN: 2656-8020 Website: http://e-journal.iainsalatiga.ac.id/index.php/jopr/index 25 Suaramu apik 'Your voice is beautiful', Pacarmu bagus 'your boy friend is handsome', and Gitaranmu luar biasa 'The way you play guitar is extraordinary', etc are delivered respectively to admire that the addressee has a beautiful voice, a good looking boyfriend, and an excellent guitar play. The speech strategy in which the literal meaning of the utterance is matched with the semantic intention the speaker wants to express is called direct strategy. In contrast, for communicating tease and insult, the speaker might also use the last three utterances above for bearing intentions which are totally opposed with their literal meaning. The illocutionary act strategy performed by the speaker is called Nonliteral strategy. Javanese speakers often use this kind of strategy in various speech acts, such as admiring, ordering, prohibiting, etc. This speech phenomenon in local term is called 'Ngelulu'.

Expressed and Implied Strategy
Another way to speak more politely to the addressee can be carried out by constructing utterances containing implicatures. In this matter, the speaker does not make direct prohibition, denial, command, order, request, etc., but constructing ones which can be inferred that the response given are bearing such intentions though implicatively. Thus, the Javanese response Ungsum udan, lho 'it is rainy season' is an implicative response of a mother in order to refuse her young boy request playing in the river. Rainy season implies flood that might endanger the child safety. So, this answer is an implied strategy used to deny the child's request. Ning kene polisine galak-galak 'In here the policemen are very strict' could be an implicative advice given to the addressee for always beware of obeying driving rules if s/he does not want to be caught because of traffic violations. So, utterances like Aja lunga ning kali 'Do not go to the river', or Aja melanggar aturan 'do not violate (traffic) regulation' are the expressed strategies for those Javanese implicative utterances.

CONCLUSION
Pragmatics is one of the most complicated branches of linguistics to study and one of the topics which has such characteristics as speech acts. In speech act, the types and categories are not solely determined by the expressed forms, but by the focus, function, and strategy as well. A certain intention can be expressed by different forms, and one form can be exploited to deliver various intentions. In other words, intentions or the speaker meanings do not have their root in linguistic structures even though structures are used as point of departure to every interpretation of intentions meant by the speakers. Because locution is regarded not important in pragmatics, and perlocution is also still very difficult to understand, illocution becomes the focus of attention of this study. As far as the illocutionary acts are concerned, the taxonomy of speech act existing in a language can be classified based on the functions and delivery strategies. The former will yield representative, directive, questioning, commissive, expressive, and declaration, while the later will result various strategies, i.e. explicit and nonexplicit, direct and indirect, literal and nonliteral, and expressed and implied. Finally, the development shows that speech act theories and all related issues tend to be more and more complicated in the future.