Speech Act Analysis of Amador Daguio’s The Wedding Dance

Abstract

The study of meaning behind word and sentence levels is the core of discourse analysis. It burrows beneath the surface of conversation exchanges between characters in a literary piece. Doing so draws the readers to the context of the story. Hence, this paper attempted to exhaustively analyze a short story titled Wedding Dance written by a Filipino poet and novelist, Amador Daguio. To comprehensively scrutinize the meat of the utterances as the linguistic data in the analysis process, the researcher utilized Searle’s five (5) speech act categories. The findings of the study showed that the conversation exchanges between the main characters, Awiyao and Lumnay, are abundant in terms of directives, commissives, representatives, declarations or performatives, and expressives.