Illocjutionary act used By Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Cappola's "The Godfather" film

This research explores the illocutionary acts types and functions employed by the character Vito Corleone in the iconic film "The Godfather" directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Central to speech act theory is the concept of illocutionary acts, which refers to the intended function or purpose behind a speaker's utterance. John Searle, a prominent figure in speech act theory, classified illocutionary acts into five main types: representative, directive, commissive, expressive, and declarative. Geoffrey Leech proposed his theory of the function of illocutionary acts, which focuses on the social purposes they serve. Leech classified the functions of illocutionary acts into 4 types, competitive, convivial, collaborative, and conflictive. The researcher uses a descriptive qualitative study to examine the utterances containing illocutionary acts made by the main character, Vito Corleone, in the renowned film "The Godfather.". To, collect the data, the researcher watched that film several times to understand the plot. After that, conversations were transcribed, and footage was examined to guarantee transcription validity. The research focused on detecting linguistic forms in the film, which were classified by utterance. To analyze the data, the researcher focused on identifying the types and functions of illocutionary acts used by Vito Corleone in every utterance that he has spoken in the film. The findings revealed a multitude of illocutionary acts observed in the dialogues involving the central character, Don Vito Corleone, as analyzed through the lens of Searle's theoretical framework adopted by the researcher and found 96 utterances categorized as illocutionary acts. Among these acts, the most recurrently identified were Directive Illocutionary acts, which prominently surfaced throughout the collected conversations. Additionally, assertive or representative illocutionary acts ranked second in terms of frequency, followed by other categories. Notably, the prevalent function of the illocutionary acts, as discerned by the researcher, aligns with Leech's conceptualization of the competitive, convivial, collaborative, and conflictive functions of illocutionary acts.