No abstract

Political discourse is primarily identified as political action, the discourse of deliberating which course of action to follow in accordance with specific political goals (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012: 1). A pragmatic analysis of various sub-genres of political discourse can identify the preference for particular speech acts. The first aim of this paper is to analyze commissive and expressive illocutionary acts in political speeches, as indicators of personal involvement of political speakers, notorious for vagueness and avoiding commitment. A corpus of Serbian, American and British political speeches that address the issue of economic standard of living has been examined to identify commissive illocutionary acts as indicators of politicians’ explicit commitment to a chosen course of action, and expressive illocutionary acts as indicators of politicians’ explicit attitudes to their own or other politicians’ chosen practices. The analysis classifies subtypes of commissives and expressives in the corpus and identifies illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs) that constitute them in English and in Serbian, after which the resulting classifications are compared and contrasted. The research results are aimed at explaining the hypothesis that a specific use/lack of commissives and expressives can be the politician’s strategy for adding credibility to their speeches, and in that way, swaying public opinion to serve the politician’s interest; conversely, establishing the relation between the use/lack of these illocutionary acts and the politician’s commitment to actions can be a method for exposing the politician’s lack of credibility and accountability.

No abstract

The paper presents the results of a corpus-based contrastive study of interrogatives in written academic discourse in English and Serbian. Three corpora were analyzed (articles written by English and Serbian authors in their mother tongues, and by Serbian writers in English) in order to establish the distribution and functions of interrogatives, with the special emphasis on possible transferring of writing habits from the authors' native written culture to the AngloAmerican one. The analyzed academic articles come from various social and hard sciences, in order both to establish cross-disciplinary variations and, more importantly, to depict some culture-based preferences in the use of interrogatives. Being rarely used as the request for information in academic articles, the interrogatives are viewed as indirect speech acts performing various interpersonal functions, such as drawing the readers' attention to a specific idea or result, announcing or giving comments on the proposition material, or establishing contact with the reader.

No abstract