The Role of Expressive Speech Acts in Revealing Character’s Personality in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017)

The movie Lady Bird depicts the coming of age journey of its characters and captures the complex emotion of mother and daughter relationship. This study explores how expressive speech acts and personality traits can correspond with one another to reveal the characterizations. The purpose of this research is to examine the types of expressive acts used by Lady Bird and Marion and how they correspond with the Big Five Personality Traits theory. The significance of this study is to reveal how language use in dialogue can provide deeper psychological insights into the character’s characterization and how it affects their relationship with each other. Employing the descriptive qualitative method, this study collected 89 data of expressive acts based on Searle & Vanderveken (1985) theory and correlated them with personality traits using McCrae & John;s (1992) Big Five model. As a result, the data findings indicate that Lady Bird dominantly uses protest and lament speech acts, these along with traits of high neuroticism and low conscientiousness, reflecting on her emotional instability and impulsiveness. On the other hand, Marion frequently used complaint and lament speech acts, correlated with high conscientiousness and low agreeableness, reflecting her as organized yet less empathetic. This study excels on the understanding of how expressive speech can serve as indicators of personality traits in narratives, offering a relationship between pragmatics and psychological characterization.