You have no items in your shopping cart.
ABSTRACT
A number of researches have been carried out on speeches of prominent people all over the world. Much attention has been paid by scholars in language and linguistic discourses to the study of speeches. Our study therefore investigated the various types of speech acts performed by President Muhammadu Buhari in some of his selected political speeches. We focused primarily on the locutionary, illocutionary and the perlocutionary acts in our analysis. It should be noted here that the data (ten speeches) were collected from the internet. These speeches include;one Inaugural Speech, two Independence Day Speeches, three Democracy Day Speeches, one Budget Speech, two New Year Speeches and one Sallah Speech. They were carefully selected because of their political nature and period, and they are speeches made between May 292015 and 12thJune, 2019. We analysed these speeches using the Speech Act Theory (SAT) of Austin (1962) and Searle (1969). Surface to this is the tabular presentation showing overall frequency percentage. One hundred (100) utterances were obtained from the ten selected speeches. The first five and last five sentences were identified from each speech. Thus,each of the ten sentences from the ten speeches caries a percentage point. Hence we have tenutterances multiplied by ten speeches equals one hundred percentage points. The frequency parentages showed Assertive 49%, Directive 8%, Commissive 16%, Expressive 25% andDeclarative 2%. This shows that Mr. President relied on utterances that performed assertive acts more than other speech acts because elections are over and President Muhammadu Buhari is now struggling to fulfill the promises. This study has further added to the body of knowledge in linguistics and discourse analysis in general and analysis of our political leaders in particular.
