A Speech Act Analysis of American Presidential Speeches

This paper is an attempt to explore how politicians can produce a certain effect on their audience by examining what specific types of utterances, or speech acts, they use when delivering their speeches; therefore, it aims at assessing the usefulness of Speech Act Theory as a framework for analyzing presidential speeches to have a better understanding of the political purpose of these speeches, for it is believed that the crucial events, conflicts, and challenges the American people face during the period spent by their presidents in office have an important impact on the types of speech acts produced in their speeches to make their audience act upon a certain impulse resulting in a presidential speech which may either be emotional, informative, persuasive, or motivational that each should accordingly reflect a specific pattern of speech acts. In this paper a linguistic taxonomy of communicative acts based on Austin‟s linguistic principle of the illocutionary acts and developed by Bach and Harnish (1979) has been adopted. It provides a vehicle to classify speech acts in order to reveal the linguistic and political underpinnings of four American presidential speeches which represent crucial events in the life of American people. The results of the analysis have provided evidence of the fact that socio-political events witnessed by the country have a great impact on the types of speech acts performed by the American presidents resulting in presidential speeches with different motives.