A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ILLOCUTIVE SPEECH ACTS IN ONLINE FOOD DELIVERY PROMOTIONS IN INDONESIA

Abstract

Online food delivery (OFD) services have become a competitive arena shaped not only by price and promotion but also by how platforms construct promotional messages. This study compares illocutionary speech acts in promotional texts produced by ShopeeFood, GrabFood, and GoFood. It employs a descriptive qualitative design with a pragmatic approach. The data consist of 30 digital promotional materials, ten from each platform, collected between August 2023 and May 2026 from official channels and in-app promotional materials. The unit of analysis is a verbal utterance unit classified using Searle’s taxonomy of assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations. Across 178 coded occurrences, assertives were the most frequent category (46.6%), followed by directives (27.0%), expressives (16.3%), and commissives (10.1%); no declarations were identified. Within each platform, ShopeeFood contained 45.0% assertives and 21.7% commissives, GrabFood 40.9% assertives and 34.1% directives, and GoFood 51.4% assertives and 31.1% directives. The findings indicate different tendencies in packaging information, calls to action, promotional commitments, and affective expression. The study maps illocutionary functions in promotional texts and does not measure actual perlocutionary effects such as purchase decisions, trust, or consumer loyalty.