Study on the Effectiveness of Commitment Speech Act from the Perspective of Force Dynamics Theory

Abstract

Commitment speech acts play an important role in various fields, but compared to other speech acts, they have not yet received sufficient attention. In political discourse, the implementation frequency of commitment speech acts is quite high, while their usage characteristics, pragmatic strategies, and the influence of social domain factors still need to be explored. The correct implementation of commitment speech acts is helpful to achieve the purpose of communication and promote the success of communication. Therefore, based on Talmy’s force-dynamic theory, this paper collects relevant language materials of commitment speech acts contained in British Prime Minister’s “Brexit” political speech discourse, attempts to consider pragmatic factors on the basis of the force-dynamics model to construct force dynamics models about commitment speech acts for analysis. By analyzing the working mechanism between internal and external parameters in force dynamic schema under different promise strategies, this paper explores the action mode of “illocutionary force” in speech acts of commitment and the implementation path of commissives under the influence of social domain factors and other factors. This paper interprets commitment speech act from the cognitive perspective, expecting to broaden the research paradigm of commitment speech acts and provide ideas for future multi-dimensional study on speech act theory.