الوعود في خطابات سياسية مختارة للرئيس باراك اوباما وميت رومني : دراسة تداولية
Author name:
هبة كريم نعمة الصفار
Supervisor name:
جاسم ناصر العزاوي
General topic:
Foreign Languages
Specific topic:
English - Language
Degree:
Master
University:
University of Baghdad
Language:
English
University location:
Baghdad
First pages:
06T1178 - p.pdf
Abstract:
This study tackles the speech act of promising as a conventional practice of the politicians whose expressions are laden with hope and assurance for a prosperous future. The speech act of promising is regarded as one of the most considerable speech acts, which evokes the feeling of commitment and obligation on the part of the speaker to perform beneficial future actions for the hearer. The political speeches comprise a great deal of rhetorical devices which are used in the political campaigns, where politicians usually make use of promising as an influential strategy to drive the hearers to vote for them. As a noticeable strategy of politeness, promises are produced to bring about trust, solidarity, and honorable intentions between the speaker and the hearer.The present study aims to identify the speech act of promising and its function in the political speeches of two American politicians : President Barak Obama, and his opponent Mitt Romney. It deals with identifying the politicians’ use of mental verbs to evade the commitment and obligation that promises evoke. The intended study helps to distinguish the effect of culture on the speakers’ use of the act of promising, and discover the sincerity of the speaker’s commitment and obligation to a future action. The researcher intends to examine other strategies of persuasion in addition to the speech act of promising since they are uttered in the same context.To attain these aims, the researcher adopts Halliday's Transitivity of Systematic functional Grammar. This method is introduced by Michael Halliday in 1960 to suggest options available for the speaker to express performance of future actions. This study comes up with some a result among which is that promises are of two types : explicit and implicit. Theviiiformer includes the use of the word 'promise', and the latter implies the use of the structure of future tense 'will + verb'. Besides, there are pragmatic and grammatical functions of the speech act of promising. The pragmatic l function is used as a perlocutionary act, or a persuasive strategy. In politics, politicians make use of the speech act of promising to convince audiences to vote for them. Thus, it is used to reduce the hearer's uncertainty. The grammatical function of promising, on the other hand, is a mental process if it is performed explicitly. As a mentally performed verb, the speech act of promising has the function of indicating the speaker's intention, or speaker's mental activity, and performing future actions.Moreover, to avoid being committed and obliged to perform future actions, the speaker makes evasive expressions represented in the their substitution of 'promise' with other verbs like ' know', 'believe', 'want'. The culture that the promisor belongs to also influences greatly the way the speech act of promising is produced and even understood. American politicians are cautious when making promises because the public will build great expectations on the politicians' performance of their promises, and there will be mistrust between them in case that these promises are not kept. Finally, the meaning of promising is precisely conceived when it is uttered in a context. The speech act of promising is strengthened in accordance with other strategies that Halliday calls them 'circumstances' under which the act is fulfilled.
