Speech Act Variety of Traders in Traditional Markets during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Medan

Abstract

The COVID-19 breakdown affects many countries, people, and aspects, including Indonesia and its trade sector. One of the aspects affected is the traders in traditional markets. Traders in traditional markets also get the impacts of the decline in sales turnover. Traders in traditional markets in Medan also felt the impact. This research aims to describe the variety and function of the speech acts of traders' to the questions designed by researchers and consumers as speech partners regarding their sales and purchasing power during the COVID-19 pandemic in traditional markets in Medan using a pragmatic approach. The research applies a qualitative descriptive method by using participant observation technique and recording the ongoing trading interactions. The data in this study are the traders’ speech acts based on the designed questionnaire which is analyzed with Austin and Leech's (1969) speech act theory. The obtained results are 3 forms of speech acts, namely assertive, expressive, and declarative. The result finds that the dominant speech act in this study is assertive speech act. However, this study did not find commissive speech acts which caused by the responses or utterances given by the traders do not show the feature of the speech acts.