Expressive Speech Acts In Barack Obama's Speeches

Speech acts are the way of communication to express the speaker’s feeling, ideas and thought through their utterances and performed by actions. Expressive speech acts are to express what the speaker feels to the hearer by a psychological attitude of the speaker, they can be the statement of thanking, greeting, praise, apologizing. The researcher conducted a research about expressive speech acts in some of the speeches of Barack Obama. The problems are formulated in two research questions, they are: 1) what are the kinds of expressive speech acts used by Barack Obama in speeches? 2) what are the purposes of expressive speech acts used by Barack Obama inspeeches? This research uses a descriptive qualitative method. It is appropriate for this research because the data that is analyzed constitutes transcript text of Barack Obama's speeches. The researcher takes five speeches as data will analysis and it download from the internet. In this research, the researcher uses Searle's (1969) theory and other speech acts theory as supported theory. The results of the research found 56 data from four kinds of expressive speech act in Barack Obama's speeches, they are 4 greeting, 19 thanking, 20 praising, 12 wishes and 1 apologizng. The purposes of expressive speech acts, they are: the purpose of greeting is: to greet people and to start up in conversation. The purposes of thanking are: to express gratitude, to return a greeting, to respond expression of well-wishing, to make the end of an exchange or conversation, to make the hearer feel good. The purposes of praising are: to express admiration, to express commendation, to give appreciate to someone or something, to give motivation and encouragement. The purpose of wishes is: to express the speaker's hope or desire to someone or something. The purposes of apologizing are: to make other people and ourselves better, to bring things back to normal situation, to expression of regret and feel makes the speaker good and care for the people the people that we accidentially hurt.