Directive Illocutionary Acts in Hoppers: A Contextual Analysis of Refusal Possibility
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24256/ideas.v14i2.12220Keywords:
directive illocutionary acts; Hoppers; pragmatics; field, tenor, and mode; possibility of refusalAbstract
Directive illocutionary acts encourage the hearer to perform a particular action. Although previous movie-based studies have examined how such acts are classified, most focus mainly on identifying directive types and rarely connect them systematically to situational context or to the hearer's possibility of refusal. This study addresses that gap by identifying the directive illocutionary acts produced by the characters in the movie Hoppers and analyzing how field, tenor, and mode, following Halliday and Hasan (1989), shape their realization based on Searle and Vanderveken's (1985) classification, along with the extent to which the hearer is given the possibility of refusal. This study employed a descriptive qualitative research design using observation and note-taking techniques. Thirty-three directive illocutionary acts were identified, from which ten utterances were purposively selected for detailed analysis, representing the major communicative functions and situational configurations found in the data. The findings reveal nine directive sub-types, namely ask, request, command, order, suggest, warn, advise, urge, and require, with ask as the most dominant, occurring eleven times (33.3%). The analysis further shows that these directive sub-types can be interpreted through four communicative-function groups: directives allowing the hearer the possibility of refusal, directives expressing advice and warning, directives expressing urgency, and directives based on power or authority. These findings indicate that directive illocutionary acts and the hearer's possibility of refusal vary systematically according to the situational context and the relationship between participants, particularly the relative power between speaker and hearer. This study contributes to pragmatic research by integrating directive classification, context of situation, and the hearer's possibility of refusal as an analytical framework for examining directive language in movie dialogue.
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