An analysis of pragmatic features of conversations in the film “the pursuit of happyness”

Abstract

This study investigated and analyzed pragmatic features of conversations in the film “The Pursuit of Happyness”. The examination of the pragmatic features of the conversations in the film centered on speech acts, adjacency pairs including presequences and insertion sequences together with implicatures of speakers concerning communicative functions of utterances and politeness strategies employed in the conversations. The study applied conversation analysis as the analytical framework under descriptive research design. The total of 1087 utterances in 64 conversations in the film were gathered and examined. In terms of five types of speech acts, the occurrence of representatives was the highest at 58.8% compared to the other types while there were no declarations discovered in the conversations. With regard to adjacency pairs, there were 17 different types of adjacency pairs, 4 presequences and 3 insertion sequences occurring in the conversations. Regarding conversational implicatures, generalized conversational implicatures were employed more frequently than particularized conversational implicatures with 84 out of 97 conversational implicatures. As to politeness strategies, the most common strategy applied in the conversations was positive politeness and the least frequently used strategy was off record. The findings showed that there was an unequal distribution of the pragmatic features in the conversations. The results of the study may serve as a helpful source to equip English teachers and learners with information linked to pragmatic knowledge that they teach or learn at school. Some suggestions were proposed to facilitate improvements in acquiring pragmatic proficiency of conversations in films and implications can be made for teachers to expect their learners to negotiate the meaning of an utterance by attaching it to a specific conversational context.