Searle’s Speech Act in Hamdan bin Muhammad’s Tweets on Twitter

Abstract

Speech act is one of the theories to study utterance in the scope of pragmatics. Because utterance is not only orally but also in written, this study describes theory of speech act in the tweets on twitter. This study concerns with the twitter of Hamdan bin Muhammad's account, a crown prince of Dubai. The formulation of the problem in this study is the various speech acts in Hamdan bin Muhammad's tweets on twitter. It used descriptive-qualitative methods with the primary data source Muhammad's story on Twitter. The secondary data sources comprise comments of the tweets, books and journals related to pragmatics and speech act theory. The results show the existence of Searle's speech act in Muhammad's tweets covering assertive, directive, expressive and declarative speech act. In his tweets Muhammad's tweets were mostly in the form of expressive speech act to show his feeling of happiness, pride, gratitude and positive mood to share with others.