A Quantitative Speech Act Analysis of Imran Khan and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s UN Speech

Abstract

The study investigates the Speech Act features, in selected speeches of popular leaders used to communicate leadership and determine their function in projecting message. Political speeches often created to persuade, inspire and encourage the public. An exploratory research design was used for collecting and analyzing the data. Two speeches of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Imran Khan at the United Nations were purposively selected for the study and form the basis for the data. The study is based on insights from, Austin (1962) Speech Act Theory in addition to the five categories of speech acts identified by Searle’s (1969, 1979). The findings of the study revealed that representative acts have maximum occurrences and greater percentage as compared to the other speech acts as they includes assertive acts (65%), expressive acts (7%) directives (19%), commissive acts (7%) and declarative acts which account for 1.5% of the total data, which suggest that more attention has been paid to the representative role of the speeches, where the concentration of the speaker is on the reality of the spoken suggestions.