Performative Verbs Research Articles

The Expression of Gratitude in English and Arabic Doctoral Dissertation Acknowledgements

Abstract This corpus-based study explores the expression of gratitude in the acknowledgement section of doctoral dissertations in both English and Arabic. The objective is to analyse how gratitude in academic discourse is structured in these languages and to explore any differences related to gender. The study examines 80 dissertations (40 in English and 40 in Arabic), further divided by the authors’ gender (20 male and 20 female for each language). Data collection involved searching for doctoral dissertations from various sources, verifying the authenticity of the native language through biographical checks, and categorising the acknowledgements based on the year and field of study. The analysis utilised a mixed-methods approach based on Hyland and Tse’s (2004) framework, enabling quantitative and qualitative text analysis. The study revealed distinct differences in gratitude expression patterns between English and Arabic dissertations: English acknowledgements often used performative verbs and adjectives, while Arabic acknowledgements primarily employed nominalisation. Notably, Arabic texts showed no use of passive constructions or adjectives. Gender-related differences were also observed, such as the preference for nominalisation among male Arabic authors and the preference for bare mention among female English authors. These findings underscore the significant cultural and linguistic influences on the construction of gratitude in academic acknowledgements. The research contributes valuable insights into pedagogical approaches to teaching academic writing and highlights the interplay between language, culture, and gender in scholarly communications.

Intentionality and Addressness of Performative Verbs in Russian Charm Texts

The performativity of charm texts as sacred ritual texts is well studied in folk studies, ethnography and linguistics. The core of performative texts is performative verbs. However, there is no clear boundary between performative verbs and other verbs in performative use. There are performative verbs (‘I beg,’ ‘I conjure,’ ‘I swear,’ ‘I curse’) and non-performative verbs (‘I tie,’ ‘I cut,’ ‘I drive out,’ I clear’) in сharms. In this article, I distinguish between them using two concepts of Speech Act theory: Intentionality and Addressness. A result of my work is the classification of Russian ‘charm verbs’. The material is Russian charms in compilations from 1860s till 2000s.

HISTORICAL VARIATION OF THE EXPRESSIVE PERFORMATIVE SPEECH ACT OF APOLOGY IN THE GERMAN-LANGUAGE DIALOGIC DISCOURSE OF THE XVXXI CENTURIES

The article is devoted to the study of the historical dynamics of expressive speech acts of performative forms in the German dialogical discourse and defining diachronically permanent and variable characteristics of expressive performative acts. Historical changes in expressive performative speech acts include performative verbs and their pragmatic markers. In the discourse of the XX-XXI centuries, the number of explicit performative verbs and markers with the semantics of apology decreases, while the frequency of implicit expressive performatives and expressive performative speech acts of apology in the metacommunicative function increases.

Invitation Strategies in Yemeni Arabic and English: A Pragmatic Contrastive Study

Abstract The present study aims to examine the politeness strategies employed by Yemeni Arabic speakers and native English speakers in the speech act of invitation. The study seeks to explore and compare how these two communities produce invitations, specifically focusing on the utilization of politeness strategies. The sample for the study consisted of 330 Arabic native speakers who were students from different departments in three public Yemeni universities, as well as 20 native speakers of English representing four English-speaking countries: the USA, Britain, Australia, and South Africa. By analyzing the performance of these two language groups in producing invitations, the study aims to gain insights into the similarities and differences in politeness strategies employed in this particular speech act. The data collected through discourse completion task questionnaire (DCT) based on Blum-Kulka (1984) with some modifications. Each of the valid responses was analyzed separately to identify the type of strategies used. The findings revealed that the Interrogative invitations, conditionally hedged invitations, and invitations using performative verbs are the most common strategies employed by the native speakers of English. In Arabic, on the other hand, the most common strategies utilized by speakers are interrogative invitations, statement of personal desire, invitations using the performative verbs, Bald on record imperative strategies, obligatory/necessity statements, conditionally hedged invitations, and expressing pleasure.

The role of performative verbs in the English educational discourse in British and American fiction

The issues of performativity of the English educational discourse (EED) are considered. Under the educational discourse, the authors understand the educator's statements to the educatees in order to make an educational impact on them. The aim of the study is to define the types and characteristics of performative verbs in the English educational discourse. The authors suggest that performativity can become one of the important characteristics of educational discourse. The data for this study were collected from the English-language fiction of the 19th–21st centuries, devoted to the problems of education and upbringing. Attention is paid to performative verbs as the basis of EED. The classifications of Austin, Searle and Apresyan are taken as starting points. The results of the analysis show that performative verbs are typical of the EED, but their activity and frequency vary. The performativity of a verb depends on its position in the sentence. In some positions in the sentence, they may lose their illocutionary power and the ability to carry out an action; in this case, they are used in the phatic function. The analysis shows that the EED has a high degree of performativity, which can be considered a characteristic feature of the discourse under study.

Aesthetic speech acts: their pragmatic status, function, and realization

The subject matter of this article concerns the interpretation of texts and statements of an aesthetic nature in the light of pragmatics, i.e. as aesthetic speech acts. The author treats aesthetic speech acts as stimulating ones, which are opposed to both representative acts and determinative acts (especially, directive ones). A characteristic feature of stimulating speech acts is their persuasive nature, i.e. such a language action that induces and encourages the addressee to experience emotions but does not influence them in a volitional way. Aesthetic reactions are self-steering and do not depend on the subject’s will. Therefore, the realization of aesthetic speech acts, in comparison with other acts, is specific: it is not possible to use specialized (lexical or grammatical) exponents of the illocutionary function, e.g. performative verbs. To perform the aesthetic function, various elements of the plan of content and the plan of expression are used, which suggest the aesthetic intention of the sender: 1) the semantic content of the text or utterance; 2) its form and structure; 3) context and communication situation; and 4) translation of text/message, including the media. Due to their functional and formal features, aesthetic speech acts are divided into several subtypes: 1) macro-, meso- and micro-acts; 2) free and complementary acts; and 3) communicative and non-communicative acts.

Depicting reflections of power on illocutionary acts of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s speeches on Covid-19

Speeches are often construed to exert one’s power while projecting a political intent towards the audience. This research examines how power is reflected in speeches by Shinzō Abe, a former Prime Minister of Japan, through the categorisation of speech acts. The speeches were delivered in many of his press conferences during the Covid-19 pandemic. The research employed a quantitative approach, and the analysis largely drew on Searle's classification of speech acts to identify and categorise Mr Abe’s expressions of power. Data for this study focused on various formal press briefings, interviews, or other communicative exchanges he conducted in his role as a prime minister. Eight texts were selected for the analysis, and they were collected from the website of the Japanese Prime Minister's Secretariat office from February to May 2020. Findings from the analysis indicated that the prime minister mostly utilised performative verb utterance directions, such as informing (66%), asking (78%), promising (90%), thanking (54%), and deciding (76%), in a form of polite and respectful language, Keigo, to demonstrate reverence towards diplomatic entities. In addition, he frequently highlighted statistical data regarding the circumstances and the prevailing factors of the pandemic that led to a regime of truth and knowledge about Covid-19 in Japan. The findings provided better understanding of Shinzō Abe’s exercise of authority in managing the variability of Covid-19 incidences in Japan, as reflected in the movement of relations with the society and with those diplomatic entities. This suggests that Shinzo Abe’s speeches during the pandemic have a potential pathway that world leaders, linguists or students can traverse and inquire into to ensure community resilience to counteract the fragility caused by a pandemic.

Norm-forming speech acts in regional councils’ resolutions of the Middle Polish age on the example of declaratives

Resolutions adopted by regional councils in the Middle Polish age are highly valuable to a historian of the Polish language, since they are testimonies to the early Polish official style. The research leads to the conclusion that the repertoire of performative verbs used for verbalising norms was fairly extensive and contained both native words, mainly prefixal verbs (e.g. odkładać, odsyłać, naznaczać, postanowić, ustanowić, umacniać, uwalniać), and genetically Latin lexis (e.g. aprobować, akceptować, deklarować, deputować, libertować, prefigować). All declaratives in the resolutions are realised by means of indicative sentences with the predicate in the 1st person plural, less frequently in the 3rd person singular. The intentions discussed above are only occasionally expressed using impersonal forms, which prevail in the contemporary official texts.

DirKorp

In this paper, we present recent developments on a new version (v3.0) of DirKorp (Korpus direktivnih govornih činova hrvatskoga jezika), the first Croatian corpus of directive speech acts developed for the purposes of pragmatic research. The corpus contains 800 elicited speech acts collected via an online questionnaire with role-playing tasks, a method of simulated communication that is implemented under pre-set conditions. This method is suitable for researching speech acts due to the ability to collect a great number of examples of such acts of equal propositional content and illocutionary purpose used in the same controlled situations. The presented situations are classified into two categories with regard to the relationship between the participants of the communication act: (1) situations involving interlocutors who are not in a familiar relationship; (2) situations involving interlocutors in a familiar relationship. Assignments of the two categories are organized into four pairs, asking respondents to share a speech act of similar propositional content. The respondents were 100 Croatian speakers, all undergraduate (63%) or graduate students (37%) of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (University of Zagreb). The corpus has been manually annotated on the speech act level, each speech act containing up to 14 features: (1) respondent ID, (2) familiarity/unfamiliarity, (3) utterance type, (4) directive performative verb in 1st person, (5) illocutionary force, (6) propositional content, (7) T/V form, (8) exhortative, (9) lexical marker of request, (10) lexical marker of apology, (11) lexical marker of gratitude, (12) honorific title, (13) grammatical mood, and (14) modal verb in 2nd person. It contains 12,676 tokens and 1,692 types. The corpus is encoded according to the TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, developed and maintained by the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI). DirKorp is available for download under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license from GitHub in TEI format. We describe applied pragmatic annotation as well as the structure of the corpus.

NOTION RELATED FEATURES OF THE PERFORMATIVES COMPRISING THE VERB “TO SUGGEST” IN ENGLISH ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

The article dwells upon the study of speech acts produced within the frames of the English academic discourse wherein the illocutionary act represents an ultimate unit to consider. Hence, there is an attempt made herein to look into the notion of performativity of English verbs, with the verb “to suggest” being an integral part of the English modals can/may-comprising constructions and playing a key role in this analysis. The field of this study is dedicated to the semantics of an event in academic medical discourse, aimed at revealing the possible trends for mental representations in the course of medicine-related texts reading as well as modelling possible scenarios of such events and their occurrence. The aforementioned information with due account of such terms as plau-sibility, certainty and likelihood that are of high importance when it comes to the medicine and health-related topics, brings across the purpose of this study. This work is thus aimed at proving (and finding the corresponding evidence or reasoning) the fact that the verb “to suggest” belongs to the performative ones. Such methods as due observation and systematic analysis help us reveal the comprehensive properties of the verb “to suggest” as a basis underlying the author’s intentions and representing the new special type of performatives named “implicitly assertive” as suggested by Y.M. Suleymanova in her study dedicated to the performative types.In the course of this study, we consider a handful of possible scenarios with can/may-comprising constructions following the main clause introduced by the verb “to suggest” and apply the theory of speech acts developed by J. Austin. The findings we obtain herein bring us to the conclusion that the verb “to suggest” should be referred to as a performative verb, belonging to the so named class of “implicitly assertive performatives”.

ЕВОЛЮЦІЯ ДИПЛОМАТИЧНОЇ МОВИ У ТЕКСТАХ МІЖНАРОДНИХ УГОД (на матеріалах документів щодо врегулювання Карабахського конфлікту)

The purpose of this work is to study diplomatic Russian language evolution, based on the analysis of documents on settlement of the Karabakh conflict and relations between neighboring countries. The objective of the study is to analyze the process of formation of modern vocabulary, features of morphology and syntax in Russian diplomatic language used in negotiation processes and in the preparation of diplomatic documents in the countries of the region in the period from the 18th to the 21st centuries. Since the negotiation processes and documents related to them, based on relations between Russia and the countries of the region, will be considered, cultural-historical, comparative approaches, as well as methods of linguistic observation, contextual, transformational and quantitative analysis are involved in the study. The evolution of the Russian diplomatic language and style is conditioned by both extralinguistic (political situation, wars, changing social formations and the creation of a new state, economic relations, etc.) and linguistic (interaction with other languages, structural and semantic changes, changes in the stylistic affiliation of words) factors influencing the development of the Russian language as a whole. Nevertheless, a number of trends can be identified which characterize the development of the directly diplomatic language: its vocabulary, morphology, and syntax. Changes at these levels reflect the process of the diplomatic language formation as a sphere of official business style and, at the same time, its formation as a unique and self-sufficient diplomatic discourse. The development of the lexical level was largely associated with a change in the composition of the vocabulary used in diplomatic documents in a particular era. The analysis of diplomatic documents shows that in the 18th–19th centuries, the composition of the vocabulary, firstly, indicates that the official business style was at the initial stage of formation; secondly, it reflects the process of the formation of the Russian literary language, a departure from foreign borrowings that actively replenished the language in the era of Peter the Great. This is evidenced by the fact how often are used expressive and evaluative vocabulary, high bookish vocabulary, common and colloquial vocabulary, etiquette-complimentary vocabulary and low frequency of borrowing terms. The desire for maximum accuracy in the presentation of conditions in international treaties is evidenced by the rather high frequency of full and partial synonyms use. Diplomatic vocabulary of the twentieth century (Soviet period) is characterized by the absence of high book vocabulary, a significant increase of common vocabulary, borrowing terms and a decrease of expressive-evaluative, full and partial synonyms and etiquette-complimentary vocabulary. Neologisms, speech (including ideological) clichés come to replace the new formations associated with the construction of the socialist formation state – abbreviations in the texts of notes and internal documents, which indicates the formation of the lexical composition of the official-business style. The composition of the vocabulary of the modern period (the end of the 20th – the first third of the 21st centuries) is characterized by the almost absence in the analyzed documents of expressive-evaluative and etiquette-complimentary vocabulary (which are incorporated into the composition of cliché speech formulas) and is replenished with euphemisms and contextual synonyms. The frequency of use of certain types of vocabulary is changing – a significant increase in speech clichés, a slight increase in neologisms and a decrease in the level of borrowing terms and abbreviations use. Morphologically the analyzed documents texts cut seems to be the most expressive in terms of the impact intentionality degree on the opponent. An indicative trend is the weakening of the semantics of obligation and the strengthening of semantically neutral forms, expressed in the practical rejection of deontic modality use and the infinitive in the function of the imperative mood, as well as in the increasing activity of performative verbs use in the passive voice and verbal nouns. The use of performative verbs in the passive reflects the desire to level the specifics in indicating the persons or organizations in respect of which obligations are determined and allows to neutralize the general tone of the document. The intensive use of verbal names, which form a significant percentage of speech clichés (chancellery), indicates the closest convergence of the diplomatic style with the official business style in the 21st century. In the development of the syntax of diplomatic texts, there is a tendency to simplify constructions, replacing complex sentences with simple ones, including adverbial/participial phrases. The logical presentation, which concludes the subordination of some facts to others, is supported not by a polypredicative construction, but by the topic deployment of content in several monopredicative sentences. Such changes in syntax are due to the desire for brevity, conciseness and maximum accuracy of presentation in conditions of weak individualization of style.

DIRECTIVE SPEECH ACT IN KEAJAIBAN TOKO KELONTONG NAMIYA BY KEIGO HIGASHINO

The purpose of this study is to identify and discuss the types of directive speech act found in the novel Keajaiban Toko Kelontong Namiya (KTKN). This study is descriptive qualitative research, in which the data are in forms of words. The researcher used Pragmatics approach in analyzing the data, particularly speech act theory by Searle. The source of data is the utterances made by the characters in the novel KTKN and data were obtained by using non-participant observation method. In addition, note-taking was used as the advanced technique to take notes of utterances that used directive speech act. The result of this study shows that there are four types of directive speech act used by the characters in KTKN novel, namely ask (to), advise, warn and beg. The most used type is ask (to) with 35 utterances (50.72%). Then it is followed by directive speech act type advise with 23 utterances (33.34%), warn with 10 utterances (14,5%) and lastly beg type with 1 utterance (1.44%). Ask (to) as the most used directive speech act is influenced by the role of the characters Mr. Namiya, Atsuya, Kohei and Shota as the person who were trying to help people by giving advice and offering a solution to their problems. They tend to help people by asking them to take an action and the utterances with directive speech act type act (to) that they used are marked by the phrases with performative verbs like silakan, jadi berhentilah. coba lihat, tolong and lakukan.

RHETORICAL MOVES DALAM INDUKSI HIPNOTERAPI: ANALISIS GENRE

Hypnotherapy can be used as an effective therapy to overcome certain symptoms and conditions by entering the subconscious mind and giving positive suggestions to clients. When a therapist provides hypnosis, there is a distinctive linguistic structure. This structure can be analyzed using genre analysis. This study will focus on genre analysis in hypnotherapy induction by looking at the rhetorical moves structure of each hypnotherapy technique performed. In this research, the descriptive qualitative method is used, which aims to describe the rhetorical moves contained in the hypnotherapy induction script. The data used in this study were obtained from the Indonesian Board of Hypnotherapy training module in as many as five induction scripts. The technique used to analyze the data was immediate constituent analysis of each utterance in the hypnotherapy induction script. This research produces 20 rhetorical moves that have been classified from 203 utterances contained in the hypnotherapy induction script. Based on the speech acts, rhetorical moves in hypnotherapy are characterized by performative verbs commanding, declaring, informing, and praising, such as the use of the verbs pay attention, relax, imagine, and feel. The results show similarities and differences in the structure of rhetorical moves that can change and are not fixed.

SPEECH CULTURE: STRATEGIES FOR SPEECH REGULATION AND MANEUVERING IN THE HISTORY OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE

The article deals with the normative, communicative and aesthetic aspects of the concept of culture of speech and politeness in the history of the German language. Ideas about the effectiveness, relevance, politeness and correctness of speech, implemented in the communicative practice of speakers of distant epochs, can be obtained from various sources. This makes it possible to reconstruct certain norms of speech behavior in action and trace the principles and rules of social communication, their changes over the centuries and determine strategies for speech regulation and maneuvering, because politeness initially performed the function of coding social belonging and hierarchy. The article focuses on the period of the court knightly culture of the Middle Ages, as well as the culture of speech in the aristocratic society of the Baroque era and the “gallant period” of the 18th century, carried out through language regulation and maneuvering. The system of markers of polite speech behavior (various pronouns, performative verbs, modal verbs, constructions of indirect polite distancing, etc.) is already formed in the Middle German language, but in the future it is subject to revision depending on the socio-cultural guidelines of society (the influence of French culture and language) and expands by increasing primarily artificial politeness in the form of mannered and ceremonial expressions, devoid of sincerity and truthfulness. The article shows that the communicative norms of polite speech behavior are determined by sociolinguistic and cognitive factors and reflect the state of speech culture and the development of the German language at a particular stage of society development.

DIRECTIVE ACTS IN INTERNATIONAL LEGAL DISCOURSE: SCALE OF ILLOCUTIONARY FORCE INTENSITY

The article introduces an eight-component taxonomy of directives in international legal discourse, depending on the degree of illocutionary force, based on the criteria of illocutionary markers, directive force mitigators and modifications of the prototypical structure of directives. The research integrates the methods of speech act analysis, tools of the theory of mitigation and discourse analysis. An eight-point degree of intensity distinguishes directives with the verbs "shall" and "must" to indicate obligations in the performative part of the prototypical structure of directives. The seventh-point degree is marked by “should” to designate recommendation. Explicit directives extended with hedges specifying possibilities of the norm adaptation in favor of the capabilities of states fall under the sixth position. The fifth degree of intensity is typical for acts marked with adjectives indicating the urgency of action. The fourth position on the scale of deintensification pertains to directives with obligative verbs in the passive construction of the propositional component, with the performative component being omitted. Directives occupying the third position on the scale of illocutionary force intensity are marked, in addition to the omitted performative component, with hedges that allow for deviation from the norm in application. A two-point degree of intensity distinguishes acts with an omitted performative component in which the position of the phrasal subject is taken by nominations of the object of obligations, instead of legal subjects. Directives with an omitted performative component, where the legal subject is replaced by the designation of the object of the directive action and the performative verb is replaced by an indirect marker of obligation, occupy the first position in terms of de-intensified illocutionary force level.

Expressive Illocutionary Speech Acts in Chinese Children Novel

An expressive illocutionary speech act is a speech in which a speaker expresses his thoughts and feelings of being thanking and apologizing. Usually, one utterance conveys one meaning, but in this research, one sentence has two to four additional meanings. This phenomenon came from elements outside the sentence that affect the presence of the additional meaning. The aim is to present the indication that one utterance can have more than one meaning and expand the theory of illocutionary speech acts. This research used a qualitative method to examine the role of context in these additional meanings. Vanderveen & Macqueen's list of performative verbs (1990) is a guide in analyzing 96 data to determine the role of context. The result shows that some data have multiple senses of expressive speech acts. There are two, three, or four meanings in one sentence. To praise one is the most common speech function found. When admiring someone, the speaker also announces his agreement and offers something in the future. The many tasks of praising found in the data show the author of this children's novel to set an example for readers, especially children, to respect others with more than one meaning.

Expressive Illocutionary Speech Acts in Chinese Children Novel

An expressive illocutionary speech act is a speech in which a speaker expresses his thoughts and feelings of being thanking and apologizing. Usually, one utterance conveys one meaning, but in this research, one sentence has two to four additional meanings. This phenomenon came from elements outside the sentence that affect the presence of the additional meaning. The aim is to present the indication that one utterance can have more than one meaning and expand the theory of illocutionary speech acts. This research used a qualitative method to examine the role of context in these additional meanings. Vanderveen & Macqueen's list of performative verbs (1990) is a guide in analyzing 96 data to determine the role of context. The result shows that some data have multiple senses of expressive speech acts. There are two, three, or four meanings in one sentence. To praise one is the most common speech function found. When admiring someone, the speaker also announces his agreement and offers something in the future. The many tasks of praising found in the data show the author of this children's novel to set an example for readers, especially children, to respect others with more than one meaning.

Exploring Gricean maxims in Facebook conversations through the lens of Gen-Z users: A pragmatic analysis

This is a pragmatic study aimed at identifying conversational maxims violated by Gen-Z users in their Facebook conversations and the conversational implicatures embedded in their exchange of conversations. This also explored the syntactic form and the corresponding illocutionary forces used in the linguistic corpora gathered. This qualitative study applied pragmatic analysis as tool to extrapolate the maxims observed by users and the implicatures generated. Linguistic corpora were gathered from computer mediated discourse focusing on Facebook platforms. Conversations were gathered through screenshots with the approval from the identified Facebook users. These were transcribed into written form and selected to fit the objectives of the study and analyzed using Paul Grices Conversational maxims and John Austins types of Illocutionary Acts. These were also elaborated by focusing on the syntactic forms of the conversation and its explicitness or non-explicitness. Data revealed that Gen-Z users violated the four conversational maxims such as quantity, quality, relevance and manner. Implicatures were drawn according to how participants exchange their responses in the comment section of the posts. Gen-Z users manifested their degree of familiarity towards one another by directly flouting and violating the Gricean maxims. The syntactic forms used were declarative sentence, Yes/No Interrogative and Wh Interrogative. From the identified lines of conversations, the illocutioanry forces used were only representative and Yes/No and Wh Questions. All these statements were all non-explicit since no performative verbs were reflected in their computer-mediated discourse. Understanding Pragmatics as one important discipline of Linguistics is essential to develop communicative competence, intercultural sensitivity and tolerance. Speakers engaging in Facebook conversations or any computer mediated discourse may have diverse cultural backgrounds but pragmatic competence would certainly ensure the success of communication.

Ideological features in Kenya Supreme Court judgments

Legal discourse is characterised by unique grammatical, lexical and stylistic features which are meant to enhance clarity and precision in the legal content. However, from a critical perspective, some of the discursive and stylistic features used alienate the common person and elevate judges and lawyers to an ideological pedestal. This study undertook a Critical Discourse Analysis of Kenya Supreme Court judgements on election petitions and civil cases with a view to investigate the discursive features used to represent legal ideology. The study was guided by Critical Discourse Analysis theory and a qualitative research design was used. The population for this study comprised the judgements made by the Kenya Supreme Court since its inception in 2010. Purposive sampling was used to identify five judgements on election petitions and civil cases. Guided by the CDA theory, features representing legal ideology were explored and discussed. The features include use of lexical stylistic features, performative verbs, legitimation, presuppositions, argumentation, interrogative forms, metaphors, precedence and predication. These features were meant to create precision and authority in the Supreme Court judgements. However, from a critical perspective, it was imminent that the features led to elevation of judges and lawyers as custodians of justice while the ordinary person was excluded from the legal process. The insight from this study is applicable to Forensic Linguistics and legal drafting. Judges and lawyers ought to use language in such a way that the common person is not excluded. Technical terminology should be used when necessary more so in contexts that involve only the legal personnel. In legal contexts that involves the ordinary person, plain language should be used.

The Speech Act of Promising in Political Speeches: A Case Study of Obama’s Speeches

This study tried to present a pragmatic analysis of the act of promising made by Barack Obama during the presidential campaigns of 2008 and 2012. It utilized a qualitative approach and the data were collected through speeches. However, this study also employed a quantitative method to calculate and present the frequency of promising utterances and performative verbs and their percentages. The researcher used Searle’s taxonomy to analyze Obama’s speeches. The findings showed that assuring, confirming, and reconfirming were the most frequent intentions of the speaker’s speeches during the two election campaigns. Further analysis revealed that Obama used the performative verb ‘‘promise’’ in 7 samples. Moreover, the study showed that the speaker used the modal verb ‘‘will’’ and the form ‘‘be going to + infinitive’’ as ways of promising instead of the performative verb ʻʻpromise.’’ Based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that further studies should be conducted in other contexts to obtain more comprehensive data regarding the act of promising.