"Now, I Pronounce You Man and Wife" : Speech Acts in Role Playing Parts of 'Pride and Prejudice' in Drama Class

Abstract

Role play is a part of drama class. It can be useful in synthesizing the popular written literary work, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. In doing the role play, speech acts are things which are impossible to neglect. In other words, the use of language in social interaction is reflected during the role play, more or less in appropriate ways or vice versa. Introducing the idea of language in English conversational context is significantly important because the process of acquiring the ‘senses’ of the English language must be done through various exposures. One of them is role play because finding the opportunities to interact with the native speakers of English in face to face communication is something which is not yet affordable, not to say impossible, for the students of English Department. Hopefully, through role playing, the students will experience a little exposure of ‘real’ speech acts of English in a conversation. In short, it is urgent to design the role play materials that has meaningful speech acts in their context. Deeper analysis of the language use, of course, is somewhat an important element in which it includes the five categories observed from their function - declaratives, representatives, expressive, directives, and commissives (Yule, 1996). In addition, based on speech acts theory, utterances cover two meanings, propositional meaning or locutionary meaning and illocutionary meaning or illocutionary force (Richards and Schmidt, 2002).