You will prepare and submit a term paper on My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Your paper should be a minimum of 4000 words in length.

You will prepare and submit a term paper on My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Your paper should be a minimum of 4000 words in length. The present project aims at analyzing the types of speech acts, the illocutionary points and the request strategy types in this movie, taking into account the theory of speech acts proposed by Searle.

The selected data for this research consists of all utterances of the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”, which were transcribed in order to assure a clear analysis of speech acts. It is possible to distinguish between the film dialogues and the narration of Toula, the main character, mostly at the beginning of the film. The dialogues taken from a movie resemble natural interactions between people, although this material is scripted and fictive, and they enable an empirical study of speech acts. In this sense, it is important to consider the role played by the conversation in the speech act theory, since the reference to conversational sequences is presupposed in the study of speech acts, as stated by Sbisà (102). The analysis of the movie data allows an empirical study from conversation to individual speech acts, as Sbisà suggests (110), and not in the other direction since the theory must explain the facts instead of trying to adapt the findings to the theory. Most of the time, the movie represents conversations between the characters, and, despite not being its main goal, the results of this research can be useful for further insights regarding the relationship between speech acts and conversation. The present study analyzes the realization of the speech acts of requests and provides an overview of the illocutionary points. The analysis is focused on the area of speech act verbs.

The theory of speech acts was applied to analyze the data, because it provides insights about the language used, and allows studying films in a detailed way, which can reveal the communicative practices represented on them. Searle’s approaches regarding illocutionary points, verbs, indirect speech acts, and conversation are taken into account for the application.