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A Speech Acts Analysis of The Misunderstanding in Abbott and Costello
A Speech Acts Analysis of The Misunderstanding in Abbott and Costello
Ignasia Yuyun
Indonesia University of Education
Email: [email protected]
ABSTRACT
Speech acts is the basic unit of communication. If the addressee cannot catch
what actually the addresser means or the addressee cannot catch the speech act humor.
Speech act and language function cannot be separated because language function is
used to highlight speech acts.
In this study, the writer wants to analyze the type of speech act of the utterances
in the illocutionary acts. The writer is also curious to know what makes the dialogue
between Abbott and Costello “Who’s on first?” becomes humorous. It is assumed that
the humorous utterances caused by misunderstanding between the participants. Thus,
the writer uses Searle’s Theory (1976) of speech acts to classify the illocutionary act.
The data got from http://www.phoenix5.org and then analyzed the jokes that were in
the form of dialog by describing the type of speech acts. Finally, the writer explained the
cause of humour of this dialogue.
The findings revealed that the types of illocutionary acts occurred were
assertives, directives, and expressive. Moreover, the cause of humour was because the
hearer failed to catch the intended meaning of the speaker.
INTRODUCTION
Language has an important role in human’s life. According to Wardhaugh (1977),
language has several roles; ”language as a system, language as arbitrary, language as
vocal, language as symbol, language as human, and the last is as communication.” The
last role is one of the important roles of language. Language allows people to say things
to each other and to express their communicative needs. Moreover, language is the
cement of society, allowing people to work, and play together, to tell the truth but also
to tell a lie, or lies (Wardhaugh, 1977).
Communication, in this case, is a social activity requiring the coordinated efforts
of two or more individuals. Through communication people can express their idea or
opinion toward someone or something. To make communication lively, people need
something interesting or funny to be heard or seen. Humor is one way of
communication, which can entertain and make people laugh. Moreover, people like to
hear humor for their relaxation after they face stressful experience in their daily life. The
humor sometimes occurs because of the misunderstanding that happens in the
conversation between the speakers and the addressees.
Misunderstanding can be funny because when the speaker utters something to
the addressee and the addressee cannot catch what actually the speaker means, but the
THEORETICAL FOUNDATION
Speech Act Theory
According to Austin, speech act is an action that is performed through utterance
(as cited in Schriffin, 1994, p.49). “A locutionary act is the production of sounds and
words with meanings, an Illocutionary act is the issuing of an utterance with
conventional communicative force achieved “in saying”, and a Perlocutionary act is the
actual effect achieved “by saying” (Schiffrin, 1994, p. 51). In this study, those three acts
were used to analyze the utterances that contained humor. The locutionary act was the
utterance itself, the illocutionary act was the intended meaning of the speaker’s
utterance, and the perlocutionary was the response of the listener.
Moreover, Searle (1976) posits five types of speech act:
1) Assertives: statements that may be judged true or false because they purport to
describe a state of affairs in the world (paradigm cases: asserting, claiming, reporting,
classifying, generalizing, defining, explaining, describing, exemplifying, predicting,
advising, warning, comparing, and concluding)
2) Directives: statements that attempt to make the auditor´s actions fit the propositional
content (paradigm cases: asking, suggesting, inviting, requesting, ordering,
commanding, and questioning)
3) Commissives: statements which commit the speaker to a course of action as
described by the propositional content (paradigm cases: promising, threatening,
undertaking, offering)
METHODOLOGY
The methodology employed in this study is descriptive qualitative. A
qualitative study is an inquiry process of understanding a social or human problem,
based on building a complex, holistic picture, formed with words, reporting detailed
views of informants, and conducted in a natural setting. (Cresswell, 1994). The objective
of this study is to analyze pragmatically the speech acts of a conversational humour.
More specifically, the conversational humor are discussed with respect to the theory of
speech acts itself, how the theory is used to analyze misunderstanding in comedy, and
how the theory is used to explain in what way the utterances are humorous. The scope
of this study is on discourse analysis, since it focuses on the relation between utterances
and the interpretation of the utterances through the analysis of locutionary, illocutionary,
perlocutionary acts. Moreover, the writer focused on analyzing the conversation through
the speech acts. Thus, the writer used Searle’s theory about speech acts, which stated
that utterances perform five types of speech act: assertive, directives, commissives,
expressives, and declaratives. The writer would like to analyze their speech act, “the
distance between what is said and what is meant, and the multiple layers of meaning
between the literal prepositional meaning of an utterance and the act which is performed
in context “(Stubb, 1983, p. 147).
Moreover, the data were taken from conversation transcript of “Who’s on first?”,
“Who’s on first?” was selected since it is a humor dialogue that tells about classic routine
of Abbott and Costello about baseball positions. The writer chooses this dialogue because
the writer is interested in the way the characters (Abbott and Costello) deliver the humor
or jokes through their speech. The process of data analysis comprises describing the type
of speech acts produced by the participants in “Who’s on first?” by using speech act theory
focused on illocutionary. Then, classifying them into the types of language functions. The
next step is describing what made those conversations become humorous. Then, putting
the answer in the tables below in order to ease the reader in reading findings. The first
table shows the result of speech acts and language function analysis. The second table
shows misunderstanding in the dialog.
Based on the table above, the writer found out that there were misunderstandings
in the conversations between Abbot and Costello in ‘Who’s on first?’ that caused humor
and the misunderstandings that happened in the conversations were often caused by
different interpretation between the characters in Who’s on first?. This exchange involves
two instances of misunderstanding on the part of Costello.
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