Commissive Speech Acts on Hillary Clinton at US Presidential Debate.

Abstract

The study is about the use of commissive speech acts used by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the US Presidential debate. The aim of the study is to identify and analyze the use of commissive speech acts in the first session of US Presidential debate based on Searle‟s speech act classification. The researcher used the qualitative study. The result of the study showed that there are 78 utterances containing the commissive speech acts. The researcher found 17 utterances or 21,8% from the total data for commissive speech act promise. Then followed by guarantee with 23 utterances or 29,3% data. Refusal act used in 27 utterances or 34,6% data. Meanwhile, volunteer speech act used in 2 utterances or 2,6% data. The last is offer speech act with only 9 utterances or 11,5% data found. The commissive speech act threat was not occurring or not used by the candidates at all. It is because threatening is not suitable for such presidential debate context. They are prefer used utterances that indicate persuading to get the votes from citizens of America. Based on the result above, the researcher suggests the readers especially those who are concerned with the pragmatic study to read this final project before making a final project with other explore topics in pragmatics studies, such as deixis, maxims, implicature, etc. It is better to give pragmatics study deeper since it is not given to the education program students in UMSU. This study is also useful in teaching learning process such as in teaching speaking because the students will get better knowledge about how to use language or utter something in a certain situation.