Speech Acts in Trials of Underage Sexual Criminal Case

Abstract

Language usage in a court trial of a criminal case is usually associated with utterances that lead to justification of the imposed punishment for the offender. Utterances of justification are usually categorized as a performative speech act. Each utterance can be categorized into five types of speech, namely representatives, directives, commissive, expressive, and declaratives. This descriptive study uses the text analysis technique, by analysing the utterance delivered in the court trial. The findings showed that mostly the Deputy Public Prosecutor and the advocates are using the directive speech act whereas the OKT and the witnesses are using representative speech acts. Keywords: speech acts; court trial; under age criminal case eISSN: 2398-4287 © 2021. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BYNC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/ebpj.v6iSI5.2922