A Pragma-Critical Discourse Analysis of Directive and Commissive Illocutionary Force in Selected American Political Speeches

Abstract

Critical and text linguistics play a key role in analyzing the speaker's intended meaning. Pragmatics examines communicative action and its appropriateness within context, while Critical Discourse Analysis identifies and investigates social injustice in language. Commissive and directive speech acts have been the focus of much investigation in political discourse; however, previous studies have not dealt with situational and background context from CDA perspectives. This study employs a combined qualitative and quantitative methodological approach, utilizing an eclectic model consisting of Searle's directive and commissive speech acts, Fairclough's sociocultural model, and Van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach. The data is empirical, consisting of eight selected political speeches from the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris hosted by ABC News in September 2024, with four texts analyzed for each speaker. The study investigates how both politicians view themselves from a pragma-critical perspective, how Searle's approach reflects conflict pragmatically, the most occurring elements in Van Dijk's model, and how Fairclough's approach constructs discourse. Findings reveal that Trump utilizes more commissive speech acts (100%) than Harris (75%), employing ordering, threatening, and vowing as powerful linguistic tools. Trump utilizes the 'society' element more frequently (75%), demonstrating dominance and power interactions, while both speakers employ Fairclough's discursive and social practices equally. These two models can address concerns about language use by powerful elites against helpless people during interaction, contributing to understanding how directives and commissives negotiate power and construct political legitimacy in high-stakes disputes.