Speech Acts of War

This research investigates Speech Acts performed in the war film Platoon. It aims at finding details about the types of speech acts, their form and how they are expressed by the interractants. Although the theory of Speech Acts proposed by Searle (1969) is intended to be completely general, they are used considerably in a military context. However, military speech acts are different from those in general use. They are likely to be more formalised and more terse than those of everyday discourse (Salt, 2004). Speech acts classifications proposed by Searle (1969) and Yule (1996) were used to analyze the data. Yule (1996) defines a speech act as actions performed via utterances in an actual situation of language use bringing the functions the speaker intends the hearer (s) to take or to interpret. The term Speech Acts covers `actions' such as `requesting', `commanding', `informing' and `complaining'. A descriptive method which aims at collecting data, analyzing da...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: WSC
• Authors: John David Salt
• Keywords: Military Speech Acts, Modeling And Simulation, Speech Acts, Speech Acts Classifications, WSC 2004