scholarly journals Pragmatic Forces in the Language of Two American Presidential Candidates

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Shilva Lioni

This article explains about pragmatic force that found in the language of two American presidential candidates in 2012 US Presidential Debate about foreign policy where the purpose on sharing a belief and influencing the other’s people view are appeared significantly in the utterances of two candidates. The pragmatic forces in this research are revealed by analyzing the illocutionary force that appeared and the reason of its performing related to the context of the utterance through pragmatics’ perspective, speech act. The result of analysis indicates that (i) four of five types of illocutionary forces were found and (ii) two of three reasons are used by the two American presidential candidates on the debate. The paper tries to highlight the pragmatic force that the speakers want to deliver where on this case was focused on sharing their belief in order to influence the other people’s (society and audiences) view. The paper also highlights some of the general considerations relating to the contexts of utterances. In analyzing the text, the writer used a combination method of quantitative and qualitative.

1982 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 509-526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Hurka

John Searle has charged R.M. Hare's prescriptivist analysis of the meaning of ‘good,’ ‘ought’ and the other evaluative words with committing what he calls the ‘speech act fallacy.’ This is a fallacy which Searle thinks is committed not only by Hare's analysis, but by any analysis which attributes to a word the function of indicating that a particular speech act is being performed, or that an utterance has a particular illocutionary force. ‘There is a condition of adequacy which any analysis of the meaning of a word must meet,’ Searle writes, ‘and which the speech act analysis fails to meet. Any analysis of the meaning of a word must be consistent with the fact that the same word (or morpheme) can mean the same thing in all the different kinds of sentences in which it can occur.' Hare maintains that the word ‘good’ is used to indicate the speech act of prescribing. He maintains that one of the principal functions of this word is to indicate that utterances of sentences containing it have prescriptive illocutionary force, and that an analysis of its meaning must make explicit and ineliminable reference to this force-indicating function. But ‘good’ regularly occurs in sentences utterances of which appear to have no prescriptive illocutionary force.


Author(s):  
Brînduşa-Mariana Amălăncei

The gestures of presidential candidates can have an important contribution to the shaping of their mediatized image, together with the other components of nonverbal communication as well as together with words. Even more, gestures can have an impact on the evaluation made by a part of the electorate concerning the candidates. Starting from the functions of gestures in which the raised index finger is involved, as established by Geneviève Calbris (1979), we will endeavour to conduct a comparative analysis of the co-verbal gestures made by the two candidates to the presidency of France, Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy, during their debate on May 2 2007. The identification of these functions does not include the gestures made with the index finger in combination with other facial components, as well as the gestures where the index finger describes lines drawn in space. The article uses as a research method the contents analysis of these gestures and is based on a scheme of categories that comprises the following indicators: designation/localization, important declaration, (drawing) attention to oneself, uniqueness, reference, refusal/negation, opposition/objection, threat/warning, or accusation.


1969 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Boyd ◽  
J. P. Thorne

In this paper we propose an analysis of the semantic structure of modal sentences in English. Central to this analysis is the notion of ‘speech act’. The notion of speech act derives principally from the work of J. L. Austin (cf. especially Austin, 1962). Austin is particularly concerned with the use of sentences like I promise to go, I bet you sixpence and I name this ship ‘Queen Elizabeth’. One of his main purposes is to show that it is a mistake to class these sentences with sentences like John is running as statements. To utter the sentence I promise to go is not to make a statement about or to report some inner condition of mind or consciousness. It is to perform the act of promising, just as to say I bet you sixpence is to perform the act of betting. Indeed, in the case of these kinds of acts (promising, betting, naming, etc.) it is difficult to see how one could engage in them without using sentences of this kind. Austin calls verbs like promise, bet and name ‘performative’ verbs. It follows from this account that verbs like say, state and assert are also performative verbs. So that the mistake involved in classing I promise to go with John is running is not that in uttering the first sentence one is performing an act and in uttering the second one is not (ignoring the uninteresting fact that the act of vocalizing is common to both), but that the speaker is performing a different act in each case—in the one case promising and in the other stating. The fact that in the case of the utterance John is running the performative verb state does not occur, so that what Austin terms its ‘illocutionary force’ is not explicitly marked in the way in which the utterance I promise to go is explicitly marked as having the illocutionary force of a promise by the words I promise, while giving rise to certain difficult problems,2 does not affect Austin's main point, which is that a complete account of the meaning of a sentence cannot be restricted to semantic analyses as these are usually understood and that they must be extended to include information about the kind of speech act involved in uttering the sentence – that is, its illocutionary force.


Author(s):  
Seth Yalcin

There is on the one hand the traditional speech act-theoretic notion of illocutionary force, and there is on the other hand the kind of notion of force we have in mind when we are theorizing in formal pragmatics about conversational states and their characteristic modes of update. These notions are different, and occur at different levels of abstraction.They are not helpfully viewed as in competition.The expressivist idea that normative language is distinctive in force can be developed in two sorts of directions, depending on which of the two senses of ’force’ is emphasized. I suggest expressivists do better to take the path stressing conversational update: they do better to start with the idea that normative discourse is distinctive in respect of its dynamic effect on the state of the conversation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 477-488
Author(s):  
Chiara Fedriani

Summary:This paper looks at uses and pragmatic functions of five hypothetic clauses used parenthetically in Late Latin to soften the illocutionary force of potentially face-threatening acts such as orders and requests. Specifically, the data show that these politeness markers typically mitigate a very specific type of interactional move, i.e., meta-textual proposals with topic-management, turn-yielding, and discourseorganizational concerns. Moreover, the corpus-based study has revealed that they are found above all in Augustine’s philosophical dialogues. Evidence from earlier research has shown, on the other hand, that in Classical Latin si placet was used almost exclusively in Cicero’s philosophical dialogues: this suggests a process of imitation within a very specific discourse tradition, where these markers are perceived as a stylistic feature typical of urbane conversations among educated friends.


TABULARASA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Deddy Kristian Aritonang

The objectives of the study are (1) to identify types of interpersonal metaphor used in the text of presidential debate between Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney, (2) to describe the impacts of interpersonal metaphor grammatical intricacy (GI) and lexical density (LD) in the text of presidential debate between Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney with reference to congruent coding, (3) to explain the ways interpersonal metaphor have impacts on GI and LD in the text of presidential debate between Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney. The findings reveal that both types of interpersonal metaphor namely metaphor of modality and metaphor of mood are found. In terms of metaphor of modality, the three values namely high, medium and low are identified as the following proportions: 18 utterances (25.71%) with high value, 28 utterances (40%) with medium value and 8 utterances (11.42%) with low value. Meanwhile the rest is metaphor of mood which is realized in questions as many as 14 utterances (20%) and command which occur twice (2.85%). All of metaphor of modality and metaphor mood have the higher ratio of GI compared to the congruent forms. As for LD, the result was various; this is to say that to one side, the presence of interpersonal metaphor in some utterances cause the utterances to have higher ratio of LD than that of the congruent codings. On the other side, the ratio of LD in some of the congruent codings are higher than that of some of the interpersonal metaphor utterances.


2020 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-306
Author(s):  
Lorena Núñez Pinero

This paper offers a pragmatic analysis of a rarely used construction in Classical Spanish: an emphatic comparison of equality with optative illocution A comparative sentence such as Así me ayude Dios como fue buena mi intención (’May God help me just as my intention was good‘) is used for emphasizing the assertion fue buena mi intención (’my intention was good‘) This construction is probably a Latinism It occurs in Latin, especially in Plautus and Terence, and is mostly attested in Spanish in humanistic comedy and in the Celestinesque tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries The first member of the construction is interpreted at the pragmatic level as a reinforcer of the illocutionary force of the comparative construction as a whole, which expresses an indirect assertive speech act Speakers perform this type of act by satisfying its sincerity condition: they believe that the event of the second member is true, because if it were not, they would run a risk, i.e. the optative would entail a curse for themselves By contrast, when the event is true, the optative entails a good wish for themselves This paper also analyzes how the pragmatic properties of the construction are reflected in its semantic and morphosyntactic properties


2019 ◽  
pp. 78-103
Author(s):  
S.A. Romanenko

The article is devoted to the analysis of representations about AustriaHungary in Russia in political and publicists societies including Bolsheviks, Social Democrats, liberals (cadets), as well as MFA analysts from February to October. On the basis of the materials on foreign policy and the correlation of revolution and world war, from Russian daily press and journalists, which have not been studied before, the author comes to the conclusion that the representatives of the left flank of the political spectrum had neither information nor conceptually built ideas about the situation in AustriaHungary, about the perspectives for the development of revolutionary processes in the multinational state and its direction and aims. On the other hand, this was also largely characteristic of the moods of the AustroHungarian politicians, whether progovernment or opposition,Статья посвящена анализу представлений об АвстроВенгрии в России в политических и публицистических обществахв том числе большевиков, социалдемократов, либералов (кадетов), а также аналитиков МИД с февраля по октябрь. На основе материалов по внешней политике и соотношение революции и мировой войны, из российской ежедневной прессы и журналистов, которые до этого не изучались, автор приходит к выводу, что представители левого фланга политического спектра не имели ни информации, ни концептуально выстроенных представлений о ситуации в АвстроВенгрии, о перспективах развития революционных процессов в многонациональном государстве и его направленности, а также о том, что они не могли цели. С другой стороны, это было также в значительной степени характерно для настроений австровенгерских политиков, будь то проправительственные или оппозиционные, для которых цели национального движения уже в 1917 году играли гораздо большую роль, чем для русских. Для сравнительного анализа на основе архивных материалов приводятся позиции Министерства иностранных дел (Временного правительства) и Петроградского Совета.


Author(s):  
Craige Roberts

This essay sketches an approach to speech acts in which mood does not semantically determine illocutionary force. The conventional content of mood determines the semantic type of the clause in which it occurs, and, given the nature of discourse, that type most naturally lends itself to a particular type of speech act, i.e. one of the three basic types of language game moves—making an assertion (declarative), posing a question (interrogative), or proposing to one’s addressee(s) the adoption of a goal (imperative). There is relative consensus about the semantics of two of these, the declarative and interrogative; and this consensus view is entirely compatible with the present proposal about the relationship between the semantics and pragmatics of grammatical mood. Hence, the proposal is illustrated with the more controversial imperative.


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