Speech Acts Analysis of President Joko Widodo’s Speech about Covid-19

Abstract

Speech act is one of the most important things in doing communication. It contains not only meaningful information but also instruction for someone to do something. This research tried to analyze about speech act. The aim of this study is to describe the types of speech acts and the most dominant types in the speech from president Joko Widodo about Covid-19. The type of this research is descriptive qualitative method. So, the writer used documentation method to collect the data. The data are the utterances containing speech acts which are found from President Joko Widodo’s speeches. From the analysis of the data, the researcher finds five types of Illocutionary acts based on Searle theory. There are 31 speech acts uttered by 2 speeches from president Joko Widodo about Covid-19 with the frequencies as follow : Assertives 22,58 %, Directives 48,39 %, Commissives 9,68 %, Declaratives 16,13 % and Expressive 3,22 % respectively.. The most dominant types of Illocutionary act is directives. Finally, the findings showed almost all types of Illocutionary acts contained commands and requests from president Joko Widodo to handle the pandemic Covid-19