Question functions used in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows movie

ABSTRACT Questions can not be separated from the daily life conversation. Commonly, questions are understood for asking or eliciting unknown information. That general understanding about questions affects of the question aims. Furthermore, people use questions in their conversation but some of them do not know the other functions of questions. They insert the questions in their talk exchange activity without knowing how to use questions according to their functions. Whereas, understanding the functions of questions are useful to construct a good conversation. Those crucial phenomena appeared related to the question functions affect the researcher to make this study. Considering the significance of the study, this study has two objectives. The first objective is to find out the functions of question used in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows movie. Then, the second objective is to describe the major categories of question functions used in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. The researcher develops speech acts theory proposed by J. Searle. A descriptive qualitative approach is used in this research to give comprehensive descriptions and discover significant functions of question in the movie dialogues. Qualitative approach deals with the data which are in the form of words and sentences The data of the research is in the form of interrogative form (question) utterances of all of actors. The researcher collects the data from the website http://www.opensubtitle.org/sherlock-holmes-a-game-of-shadows-2011-subtitles. The data are analyzed using Searle speech acts theory. Based on findings of the study, the researcher concludes that the questions of daily life represented on the movie dialogues have the functions as assertive, directive, commissive, expressive and declaration illocutionary acts. Related to the findings, the major categories of the functions of question used in the movie dialogue are on the types of directive illocutionary acts in many variant of statement. There are two reasons why directive illocutionary acts tends to be used in the movie dialogues. First, by using the directive illocutionary acts, the speaker makes another variation of performative utterance. Second, the question in the form of directive illocutionary acts function makes the utterance to be implicit, even polite. However, there is a finding that in one question consists of more than one illocutionary acts type