Speech Acts and the Development of Characters and Theme in Moana 2: A Pragmatic Analysis

This study examines how the distribution of illocutionary acts reflects character development and themes in the 2024 animated film *Moana 2*. Previous speech act research on the *Moana* franchise has generally provided only aggregate profiles for specific films or characters, failing to track shifts across narrative phases or compare distributions against an independent narrative baseline; furthermore, in the case of *Moana 2*, only directive acts have been previously investigated. To address these gaps, this study employs a qualitative descriptive design supplemented by simple frequency counts. Verbal utterances from nine main characters were extracted from the film’s script (excluding songs) and coded according to their locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary dimensions. Illocutionary acts were classified into Searle’s five categories and evaluated against his felicity conditions. The resulting distributions were interpreted through "Pragmatic Significance"—an analytical construct formulated for this study—and compared against a narrative baseline established prior to coding. The dataset comprises 698 illocutionary acts: assertives (40.1%), directives (34.8%), expressives (21.8%), commissives (3.0%), and declaratives (0.3%). Nearly all speech acts met their respective felicity conditions (98.9%). The proportion of directives used by Moana increased from 23.8% in the exposition to 51.3% in the climax, while the proportion of expressives used by Maui rose from 15.4% to 36.8% across the four narrative phases. Of the twelve comparisons made against the baseline, eight showed convergence, while four showed partial convergence—the latter being linked to specific key utterances or nonverbal actions rather than the aggregate distribution. This study concludes that the distribution of illocutionary acts serves as a meaningful, albeit partial, indicator of character development and thematic progression. The novelty of the research lies in the integration of a phase-by-phase temporal analysis with an independent narrative baseline and the construct of Pragmatic Significance.