THE USE OF SPEECH ACTS TYPES IN FACEBOOK STATUS UPDATES

Abstract

At present, Facebook cannot be separated in today’s life of the users. It has
become life style to broadcasts what they did or what they are up to in Facebook. This
study is aimed at finding out the types of speech acts in Facebook status updates. The
language used is quite unique and vary from one person to another. It can be through
quotations, expressive language, jokes, or poetry. In this case, the Searle’s types of
speech acts was used, covers representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, and
declaratives.. There have to be speakers and hearers involving in a conversation.
However, this study analyzed Facebook status updates where no hearers available, thus
the readers were best to replace the hearers. This study used descriptive qualitative
method. The data was taken from 116 Facebook users ranging from 18-20 of their ages.
The result showed that the most frequent type of speech acts used by the users were
expressive utterances (62%), 28 representative utterances (24%), 9 commissive
utterances (8%), and 3 directive utterances (3%), and the other 4 are quotations (3%).'