A Pragmatic Analysis of Speech Acts in Contemporary English Discourse

Purpose of this study is to provide a pragmatic view of how speech acts are utilized in today's society. More specifically, it explores speech acts as social actions rather than merely as means of communicating knowledge. It examines how people perform Speech acts of asserting, requesting, promising, and expressing their attitudes through language in real-world communicative events, drawing on speech act theory as proposed by Austin and Searle. To conduct such study, a qualitative discourse analytic methodology was used to analyze a selection of written samples of contemporary English discourse from three different types of source material: media-based texts (such as newspapers and magazines), political speeches, and various face-to-face interactions. Particular attention was put on impact of contextual factors have on illocutionary force of speech acts and frequency with which they occur in form of indirect speech acts in today's world. The findings suggest that a large portion of contemporary English discourse relies upon pragmatic inference (from context of utterance), contextual reference (related to what is understood from texts), and being provided with indirect means of accomplishing communication effectively. Through presenting a description of how language functions within this pragmatic and participatory framework, this study contributes to understand and develop theories within fields of pragmatics and discourse studies, as well as provide information to utilized by applied linguists and those working with languages in educational system.