APPLICATION OF PERFORMATIVE CONCEPT ON ENGLISH LEGAL DOCUMENTS: A STUDY OF PRAGMATICS

Abstract

The legal documents contain statements binding between several parties involved in the issues listed in the document. Prenuptial agreement, power of attorney to a case, insurance payments, inheritance issues are commonly discussed in terms of a legal document. In linguistics, there is a terminology known by performative utterances. Performative concept is one example of application of language use through legal documents as a media. The concept is mentioned by Austin (1962:6). The naming comes from the verb 'perform' or refers to the noun 'action', it is said that the word refers to a speech that shows the performance or action. Performative utterance , or sometimes just simply mentioned ‘performative’ has characters : first person singular subject and followed performative verbs in active present form (1962:5).Performative cannot be regarded as right or wrong statements, but it refers to appropriate or inappropriate, legitimate or illegitimate contents of statements. Performative utterances can be explicit and implicit. Implicit performative is performative utterances with performative verbs but they are not explicitly stated. On implicit performative, conversational context greatly affects assuming the performative verb that appears. This research will try to explain the form of performative and pragmatic mechanism on the legal documents. The method used in this research is qualitative descriptive and this research is expected to contribute in application of linguistics, especially pragmatics.