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This paper aims to support the thesis that Speech Act related operators have landing sites in syntax, specifically at the syntax-pragmatics interface. In order to attain this goal, it presents the first formal analysis of a construction, dubbed the jo ‘I’ – construction, that shows an overt first person strong pronoun sitting in sentence-initial position of declarative sentences both in pro-drop and partial pro-drop languages of the Romance family. Taking Catalan as a case in point, it is shown that, prosodically, this first person strong pronoun has a particular intonation (a rising pitch accent followed by a high boundary tone). Syntactically, it corresponds not to a subject but to a (kind of) hanging topic that requires a resumptive element in the clause, while semantically it introduces a reference to the speaker who at the time of uttering the sentence is performing a subjective declaration speech act.

This paper develops a way to model performative speech acts within a framework of dynamic semantics. It introduces a distinction between performative and informative updates, where informative updates filter out indices of context sets (cf. Stalnaker, Cole (ed), Pragmatics, Academic Press, 1978), whereas performative updates change their indices (cf. Szabolcsi, Kiefer (ed), Hungarian linguistics, John Benjamins, 1982). The notion of index change is investigated in detail, identifying implementations by a function or by a relation. Declarations like the meeting is (hereby) adjourned are purely performative updates that just enforce an index change on a context set. Assertions like the meeting is (already) adjourned are analyzed as combinations of a performative update that introduces a guarantee of the speaker for the truth of the proposition, and an informative update that restricts the context set so that this proposition is true. The first update is the illocutionary act characteristic for assertions; the second is the primary perlocutionary act, and is up for negotiations with the addressee. Several other speech acts will be discussed, in particular commissives, directives, exclamatives, optatives, and definitions, which are all performative, and differ from related assertions. The paper concludes a discussion of locutionary acts, which are modelled as index changers as well, and proposes a novel analysis for the performative marker hereby.

As one of the most used social media platforms, twitter has become a powerful tool for a number of purposes, including personal and business promotions as well as social communication. As for the political celebrities, it is considered to be the fastest way to communicate with their fans, friends or even their haters. Donald Trump is the former of 45th President of the United States and also a frequent user of twitter who often posts controversial or false statements. On July 16, 2019, the House of Representatives voted to censure him for “racist comments”. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to analyze the utterances of insults on Donald Trump’s Twitter account using descriptive qualitative research method, before and after Trump became the president of the United States and will look at the utterances, forms and references. The insult utterances of Trump’s illocutionary speech acts that were found and then to be classified into (1) abusive swearing, (2) swearing, (3) obscenity, focusing on Searle’s five classification of speech acts which consist of (1) representatives, (2) directives, (3) commissives, (4) expressives, and (5) declarations.

In the age of information fragmentation, vlogs and emojis in computer-mediated communication (CMC) prevail among internet users both domestically and internationally. Emojis, which have been identified in 40% of all the vlog comments in question, perform speech acts and realize rhetorical identification in CMC, similar to verbal language communication. In accordance with the theoretical framework of Searle’s speech act theory and Burke’s identification theory, via discourse analysis and statistical analysis, this study aimed to explore the pragmatic, rhetorical features and functions of emojis in the comments of vlogs focusing on Chinese regional culture and tourism promotion. The results revealed that emoji-mediated comments included speech acts such as expressives, assertives, commissives, and directives, whereas the speech act of declarations was not identified in the present study. Moreover, emojis realize pragmatic action and reaction functions most frequently, differing from those in Herring and Dainas ( 2017 ) study. Furthermore, emojis facilitate audience identification with vlogs through sympathy, antitheses, and inaccuracies in the reception of rhetoric.

This study aims at investigating the pragmatics of the WhatsApp profile status notifications used by Jordanians. Particularly, it attempts to elaborate on the use of speech acts within Jordanians’ WhatsApp profile status. To this end, the study adopts Austin’s speech act theory. This study employs content analysis methods to analyze the corpus which consists of 1,355 WhatsApp profile statuses. The data were obtained from a sample of 1,355 Jordanian males and females, belonging to different social and educational backgrounds. The findings reveal that the most frequently occurring speech act within the WhatsApp profile status of the participants was the assertive speech acts, followed by directives and expressives; the least frequently used speech acts were declarations, preceded by commissives. The findings also show that system defaults, blanks, and emojis were also used to express various speech acts. This study can enrich the theoretical studies of speech acts in social networking services and enhance our understanding of human online communication.

Abstract Irving Singer has defended the thesis that the \"fine gold thread\" of love, its sine qua non, is the bestowal of value by the lover on the beloved, even in those cases where the love itself is grounded in a positive appraisal of the beloved's attributes. He suggests that bestowal is a matter of elevating the importance of the beloved and his or her needs and interests above their appraised merit. I argue that love's bestowal is principally effected through speech acts of the kind that John Searle refers to as Status Function Declarations, the very same linguistic mechanism by which, according to him, all of social or institutional reality is created. On this picture, the roles of lover and beloved are shown to be status functions constituted by a deontology that delineates the partiality of the former towards the latter.

Saying so can make it so, J. L. Austin taught us long ago. Famously, John Searle has developed this Austinian insight in an account of the construction of institutional reality. Searle maintains that so-called Status Function Declarations, allegedly having a “double direction of fit” (i.e. a world-to-word and a word-to-world direction of fit), synchronically create worldly institutional facts, corresponding to the propositional content of the declarations. I argue that Searle’s account of the making of institutional reality is in tension with the special theory of relativity—irrespective of whether the account is interpreted as involving causal generation or non-causal grounding of worldly institutional facts—and should be replaced by a more modest theory which interprets the results of Status Function Declarations in terms of mere Cambridge change and institutional truth. I end the paper by indicating the import of this more modest theory for theorizing about the causal potency of institutional phenomena generated by declarations.

The e-commerce scam cases reported worldwide are highly alarming, with enormous financial losses. The empirical investigation of this research focuses on the linguistic strategies utilised by scammers as their modus operandi in duping their targets. This research aims to analyse the common linguistic features of scammers and identify the steps, strategies, and patterns prevalent in e-commerce scams in Malaysia by conducting a thorough linguistic analysis of real conversation exchanges between scammers and victims. This qualitative study compiled and established a database of e-commerce scam cases from social media. From this database, 14 sets of online communications between scammers and 14 Malaysian victims were chosen and examined using the content analysis method-one facet of the data analysis involved studying scammers' linguistic styles and patterns in persuading their targets. The analysis revealed various persuasive linguistic tactics employed by the scammers to deceive the victim, which are friendly expressions, urgent disclosure, manipulated statements, persuasive language, leveraging authority declarations, fabricated social references and appealing offers. Guided by speech act theory, this study shows that scammers use locutionary acts (specific words and phrases) to appear legitimate, illocutionary acts (intentions behind the words) to make false promises or issue threats, and per locutionary acts (impact on the victim) to evoke trust, fear, or greed. This study demonstrates how scammers use subtle yet effective language to deceive individuals out of money. Contrary to the common perception of the gullible or vulnerable person \"falling for\" a scam, the findings reinforce how scammers are effective language manipulators who employ strategies to reassure victims and disassemble any reason for concern. The study highlights the importance of being vigilant to these tactics and implementing caution when engaging with unfamiliar online sellers. It emphasises the need to verify sellers' legitimacy and be wary of any requests for payment before receiving the purchased item.

This paper addresses the question of the constitution of ‘the people’. It argues that J.L. Austin’s concept of the ‘perlocutionary’ speech act gives us a framework for understanding the constitutive force of a specific constitutional document: the American Declaration of Independence. It does so through responding to Derrida’s analysis of the Declaration, which itself draws on Austin’s work. Derrida argues that the Declaration’s constitutive force lies in the fact that it cannot be simply understood as either ‘performative’ or ‘constative’, in Austin’s terminology. According to Derrida, ‘the people’ do not pre-exist the Declaration, but are constituted in the act of declaration itself. In response, I argue that while Derrida’s insight regarding the constitution of ‘the people’ is sound, his analysis misses two key aspects of the Declaration. These two lacunae point the way to an understanding of the constitutive force of the Declaration in terms of Austin’s ‘perlocutionary’ speech act.

Building on language as action perspectives and recent social movement research on speech acts, we explore the role religious discourse plays in the maintenance of a collective identity we call revolutionary \"we-ness.\" Using NVivo qualitative data analysis software we perform a content analysis of Volume 1 of The Gospel in Solentiname (Cardenal 1976), a historical record of Biblestudy discussions in prerevolutionary Nicaragua. Based on a framework of collective identity construction (boundary work, oppositional consciousness, identity assertion) into which a taxonomy of speech acts (accusations, declarations, directives, exhortations, prescriptions, and warnings) are organized, our content analysis illustrates how revolutionary we-ness is constituted, and how the recursive employment of speech acts suggests a resonance of ideological motives in religious discourse. We found the degree to which identity assertion, expressed in declarative speech acts, predominated over oppositional consciousness, which in turn figured over boundary work in the constitution of revolutionary we-ness. Our speech acts approach fills a void in framing theory and confirms religious discourse's capacity to promote radical self-understandings and commitment to revolutionary activism.