Speech acts analysis on communicative board game: an observation study on werewolf board game

Abstract

The aim of this study is to identify the types and the most dominant illocutionary acts that occur during a communicative board game, using Werewolf board game. The respondents that participate as the players in this study involving six undergraduates’ students from University Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) with Teaching As A second Language course background. The Werewolf game is also known as Mafia game were the setting takes place in a small town with a few numbers of townsfolk. Using a role-playing method, the players will be assigned randomly for a role to play. The main characters that usually used during the game are Werewolf, Villager or Shaman. A descriptive qualitative study was done by observing the utterances spoken by the players while playing their respective characters during the game. The spoken utterances were then analysed based on these types of illocutionary acts representative, directive, commissive, expressive and declarative. The result of the study showed that all five types of illocutionary acts were found in the conversations that occur during the game play was conducted. The most frequently used illocutionary acts is representative with 64.23% of occurrences while the least used acts was commissive with 1.63%. The representative forces used during the game are varied. Representative acts mainly performed when the speaker are trying to express their belief of something that can be evaluated either to be true or false which can be found easily since the context of this game will always involve interrogating with a mission to identify the identity of the Werewolf.