Investigating the Illocutionary Force of the Pragmatic Function of Intonation in Some Political Speeches Selected from the American Vice –President Joe Biden

Abstract

     Intonation and pragmatics are two fields of language that are correlated to the scope of utterance. The present study aims to investigate the illocutionary force of the pragmatic function of intonation in some political speeches selected from the American vice president Joe Biden. The paper attempts to identify the type of speech acts that Joe Biden used as well as the key patterns of intonation mostly used to reflect the illocutionary force. Ten political speeches have been downloaded from the internet. The researcher attempts to investigate intonational patterns of different speech acts in English as well as to analyze political speeches that convey different verdicative, expositive, behabitative, commissive, and excersitive forces.

  The researcher has adopted an eclectic model by using Austin’s classification of speech acts (1975) and Gimson’s intonation patterns (2001).The researcher has the role of collecting, describing and analyzing the research findings. The steps of collecting the data are the researcher downloading the script and the video of the speech in the internet and then double checked it by watching the video of the speech in the internet and analyze the illocutionary force searching the most used acts from the data and ultimately drawing conclusion and recommendations.

   Results show that intonation plays a vital role in determining the illocutionary force of political speeches. It is found that expositive acts have been widely used since they involve speakers’ assertive act.