Language and political commitment: a pragmatic analysis of President Muhammadu Buhari’s june 12 inaugural democracy day speech

Political discourses all over the world and among scholars have assumed different linguistic impetus. Language and political intrigues are inseparable concepts among the electorates and the elected political office holders in any society. Hence, this research work was conducted to identify the speech act features of President Muhammadu Buhari’s June 12 inaugural democracy day speech. The paper explored the pragmatic functions of locution, illocution and perlocutionary acts in the speech. It adopted the theoretical framework of Speech Act as propounded by J.L. Austin (1962) and modified by John Searle in his classification, (1969). It further looked at specific illocutionary acts that were used in the speech; they include assertives (31%), directives (10%), expressives (11%), commissives (46%) and declaratives (02%). Thus, the analysis proved further that the illocutionary acts performed by Mr. President showed the preponderance use of commissive and assertives acts which were mostly used to convince, assert, explain, persuade and command the listeners to certain actions. This goes a long way in showing commitment to building a better nation. The result showed that politicians rely extensively on statements or speeches using commissive acts to achieve their political ambitions before, during and after electioneering campaigns. Needed to be said at this juncture, is the fact that illocutionary acts play significant roles in political speeches across the world