Promises, promises Mr. President : A study of commissive speech act usage in 21st century American presidential inaugural addresses.

Sammanfattning

Abstract The American president’s serving period always begin with an iconic inaugural address. It is a function wherein the president can unify the audience, ratify the ceremony, and present his political and administrative direction for his term. Promises are a vital rhetorical tool and strategy at the president’s disposal; however, they can also be a demerit if used incorrectly. Within the discipline of pragmatics, promises are included in the category of the commissive speech act: an utterance which binds the speaker to a future course of action. The focus of the present study is what proportion commissive speech acts are used in relation to other speech acts by the four American presidents inaugurated in the 21st century in their inaugural addresses, as well as how these commissive speech acts are realized in terms of various pragmatic features (e.g., vagueness, deictic use, selfpositive representation, and implicature). The methodological approach adopted in thisstudy is both qualitative as well as quantitative in character. To reflect this, the study was operationalized through speech act analysis and political discourse analysis. The findingsshowcase that the presidents affiliated with the Republican party make use of commissive speech acts to a higher degree than their Democratic counterparts. Donald J. Trump appears as a clear outlier with an exuberant amount of commissive speech acts in comparison with the other three presidents. Furthermore, the findings point out that the most common strategy in how commissive speech acts were realised was to shape them as an assertion and using the inclusive deixis “we”. However, Joseph R. Biden diverged from this pattern. Instead, he used explicit promises featuring the individual deixis “I”. In addition, he often employed rhetorical vagueness which made his promises hard to measure if upheld or not.