Communication is an important factor in life. Human needs to communicate all the time. Consequently, communication is an important factor in addition to the fundamentals of human life and makes people have the knowledge and broader worldview. Humans can learn and recognize the legacy of their own culture and society in all aspects. The speakers normally expect that his or her communicative intention will be recognized by the hearer. Both speaker and hearer are usually in this process by the circumstances surrounding the utterance.
This research takes pragmatic approach as the way of analysis, considering how the speakers use the language in the social interaction with others. According to Leech (1983), pragmatics can be stated as a study of a language used in certain time and condition. Pragmatics is the study of speakers meaning base on situation. Pragmatics generally is the study of the natural understanding and specifically the study of how people comprehend and produce a communicative or speech act.
Speech act is concern with the speaker’s communicative intention in producing an utterance and it is defined by the purpose for which the speakers use the language, for example to make a request, to apologize, and to report (Yule: 1996). Speech act is the key concept in the field of pragmatics, the study of speaker’s intentions and what the speakers mean when they use the particular linguistics in context. (Hatch, 1992)
Speech act theory developed during the middle of the twentieth century out of sense of dissatisfaction on the part of writers such as J. L. Austin. Austin (1962: 108) defined speech acts as the actions performed in saying something. Speech act theory says that the action performed when an utterance is produced can be analyzed on the three different levels. These are, locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act. Locutionary act is roughly equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and reference, which again is roughly equivalent to meaning in traditional sense. Second, illocutionary act such as informing, ordering, warning, undertaking, Thirdly, perlocutionary acts achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading. (Cutting, 2002: 16) The writer realizes that in our daily life, we also always use the speech act function when we communication with others. For example, we say the weather is hot today; it means there is some implicit meaning to request to do an action that is to switch on the fan or maybe open the window.