A Pragmatic Study of School Bullying in Wonder Movie

抄録

This study explores the phenomenon of bullying as a prominent element within the American film "Wonder." Movies serve the dual purpose of providing amusement to audiences while also conveying messages of communication, morality, culture, society, and education. The problem of this study lies in understanding how language is used in the context of school bullying to exert power, control, and harm others. It involves examining the speech acts, discourse patterns, and pragmatic strategies employed by bullies. It tries to fill the gap left unbridged by other studies where many pragmatic aspects are addressed in different data. The data are subjected to analysis based on pragmatic theories, viz., speech act theory and theory of impoliteness. The questions the paper tries to answer are: what are the types and directness of verbal bullying, what are the types of speech acts, what are the illocutionary acts and the directness of speech acts, and what are the impoliteness strategies? This study aims to identify the types and directness of verbal bullying, investigate the types of speech acts in the selected data whether it is used directly or indirectly, identifying the illocutionary acts, and investigating the impoliteness strategies and it is sub-types in Wonder movie. Accordingly, it is hypothesized that direct verbal bullying of verbal abuse is the predominant type, all the types of speech acts are employed by bullies, the impoliteness strategies are used equally. The results indicate that the predominant kind of bullying observed is direct verbal bullying, characterized by instances of verbal abuse and name-calling. The direct expressive speech acts of mocking/taunting are widely used, and that positive impoliteness strategy is the most frequent strategy.