Speech Acts in Trials of Underage Sexual Criminal Case

Language usage in a court trial of criminal case is usually associated with utterances that lead to justification the imposed punishment for offender. Utterances are categorized as performative speech act. Each utterance can be into five types speech, namely representatives, directives, commissive, expressive, and declaratives. This descriptive study uses text analysis technique, by analysing delivered trial. The findings showed mostly Deputy Public Prosecutor advocates using directive act whereas OKT witnesses representative acts. Keywords: acts; trial; under age eISSN: 2398-4287 © 2021. Authors. Published AMER ABRA cE-Bs e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. an open access article CC BYNC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review responsibility (Association Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), Behavioural Researchers on Asians) (Centre Studies), Faculty Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/ebpj.v6iSI5.2922