Expressive Illocutionary Speech Acts in Chinese Children Novel

Abstract

An expressive illocutionary speech act is a speech in which a speaker expresses his thoughts and feelings of being thanking and apologizing. Usually, one utterance conveys one meaning, but in this research, one sentence has two to four additional meanings. This phenomenon came from elements outside the sentence that affect the presence of the additional meaning. The aim is to present the indication that one utterance can have more than one meaning and expand the theory of illocutionary speech acts. This research used a qualitative method to examine the role of context in these additional meanings. Vanderveen & Macqueen's list of performative verbs (1990) is a guide in analyzing 96 data to determine the role of context. The result shows that some data have multiple senses of expressive speech acts. There are two, three, or four meanings in one sentence. To praise one is the most common speech function found. When admiring someone, the speaker also announces his agreement and offers something in the future. The many tasks of praising found in the data show the author of this children's novel to set an example for readers, especially children, to respect others with more than one meaning.