SPEECH ACT ANALYSIS OF ZAKIR NAIK’S SPEECH “ISLAM AND 21ST CENTURY”

Abstract

Pragmatics and 21^st Century craft people mind to be more critical and scientific oriented. It means people need a solid news, information, innovation, particularly guidance. Even they mostly concern about the development of science and technologies, they cannot deny about the inner needs, the spiritual one. Zakir Naik, one of the phenomenal Islamic Scholars nowadays, with his speech in Oxford Union Debate, “Islam and 21^st Century” brings the people out from the misconceptions of Islam and the eligibility of Holy Qur’an to each era of this globe till this millennial time. This study focuses on the Speech Act the Searle’s theory. Therefore, the outcome of this work is the interpretation of Mr. Naik utterances related to the theory and the millennial phenomena. Consequently, this study is descriptive qualitative research methodology. There are 5 major speech act categories are found in this study; Expressive, Assertive, Commissive, Directive and Excersitive. Each category has its own sub-dimensional type. There are 2 important segments of discussion as well, the distinctive feature of Mr. Naik’s speech from other common speech and the flow of speech act used by him which make his speech performance very solid. This research is constructively developing the study of linguistics, particularly in speech act matter.