A speech act analysis of Tun Mahathir’s political speeches / Nur Dinah Mohamed Hafidz

Nur Dinah , Mohamed Hafidz (2022) A speech act analysis of Tun Mahathir’s political speeches / Nur Dinah Mohamed Hafidz. Masters thesis, Universiti Malaya.

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Abstract

Tun Mahathir is undeniably one of the most prominent political figures in Malaysia. During his tenure as the prime minister, he had transformed Malaysia’s economy into becoming one of the most rapid developing nations in the South East Asian region. Despite Tun Mahathir’s numerous successes, very few studies were conducted on his political speeches. In order to bridge the gap in literature, this study directed its focus on Tun Mahathir’s language use as an important tool in his political speeches. Speeches are a prominent form of communication. It allows a speaker to convey his/her ideologies in a larger crowd and gain more attention from the hearers. Language also plays a crucial role in assuring the speeches are delivered with great clarity to the audience particularly in political speeches. It is therefore pivotal for a political leader to understand the power on the correct use of language in his/her political speeches. This study focused on Tun Mahathir’s language use in performing the speech acts to convey his messages. The study adapted Searle’s (1969) Speech Act Theory (SAT) to analyze the utterances of Tun Mahathir’s political speeches. Moreover, the objectives of the study are to identify the types and classification of speech acts and to illustrate how the speech acts are realized in his utterances. Overall, the results show that the representative act recorded the highest frequency with 81.4%. Meanwhile, the commissive act showed the lowest frequency with 1.2% from all the five speeches.

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