Abstract
The field of pragmatics encompasses many theories of linguistics. The main objective of these theories is to study the relation between language and context. Speech Acts Theory, in particular, is of pragmatic orientation that is concerned with how words, in certain contexts, can be used to perform actions rather than convey mere information. This theory attempts to explore how the speakers employ language to accomplish the intended actions and how the hearers infer the intended meaning. Language is used to assert specific ideas, report certain issues, and express knowledge and belief in public, country, and world affairs. On the other hand, this role of language can be observed remarkably in the context of politics, which is likely to be seen in every single dialogue or conversation between two or more people. Recently, the focus is on how a politician uses language to convince his audience of what he is talking about. The current study is an attempt to explore the communicative functions of the English language in the speeches of Joe Biden (the American President) and Boris Johnson (the British Prime Minister (PM)), and it adopts the expanded Speech Acts Theory of Assertion, by Searle (1969, 1979) and Searle and Vanderveken (1985). This study is intended to investigate the employment of speech acts in the selected ten speeches of the two presidents. It aims at analyzing the illocutionary acts of assertion in the presidential texts due to the adopted pragmatic model, highlighting the different types of assertive acts and unfolding the similarities and differences in the way Biden and Johnson employ speech acts of assertion to achieve their communicative goals on the target people. As far as the significance of the study is concerned, it is expected to fill a gap in the political, psychological and sociological studies. The present study has come out with certain findings and conclusions. Among many, it proved the main hypothesis of the thesis in that Searle’s theory of assertion is a successful one in analyzing the assertion categories of presidential speeches. The study also revealed that the most frequent illocutionary act of assertion in the speeches of the two presidents is ‘Predicting’, and there are some differences in the number and types of illocutionary acts of assertion used by Biden and Johnson. For instance, ‘Asserting’, ‘Predicting’, and ‘Stating’ record 8, 7, and 5 frequencies in Biden’s speech, respectively, whereas the same acts record 5, 9, and 8 frequencies in Johnson’s speech, respectively
