Abstract
The paper studies the manipulative power of language in political discourse, more precisely, in political speech. According to the classification of Mišić Ilić and Radulović (2015), which is based on the combination of Austin (1962) and Searle’s (2001) theories, commissives and expressives were studied in a speech given by Aleksandar Vučić, held in Kosovska Mitrovica on September 9, 2018. The aim of the paper is to show the power of language to manipulate the listener, through the strategic use of these two speech acts, which would illustrate an ideological contrast: concealing the speaker’s flaws, as well as their personal responsibility and involvement, while emphasizing the positive aspects of everything the speaker stands for. Speech acts are classified according to their explicit and implicit forms. The results show that implicit forms are more dominant, and at the same time they illustrate how the speaker dissociates from directly taking responsibility for the actions he commits to. Explicit forms, on the other hand, can only be interpreted in the wider context of the utterance, in which the speaker commits to taking insufficiently concrete action.
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