Identifying The Pragmatic Force Of Attiudinal Intonation In Some Selected Political Speeches

Abstract

     The main problem of the present study may be attributed to the fact that some politicians use different ranges and patterns of intonation when they want to express different emotions and attitudes that underlie different pragmatic forces. The study aims at identifying the pragmatic force of  attitudinal  intonation in some political speeches together with identifying pitch variations that are determined by various syntactic constructions that impart the illocutionary forces of political speeches and perlocutionary acts .The procedures used in this paper are: first, collecting and classifying speeches selected from the ex-American president Barack Obama and the current American President Donald Trump from the internet ; second ,analyzing the data collected by adopting Roach’s patterns of intonation (2009)and Searle’s classification of illocutionary acts  intonation (1975)

The paper consists of two sections .Section one is a review of literature that comprises the basic terms that are of relevant to the study. Section two deals with  methodology , data analysis and results of the study.

      The main conclusions that the paper has come up with are : (1) meaning is changed by virtue of ranges of intonation, (2) pragmatic force of intonation changes emotions from one person to another by rising or falling the voice of the speaker , (3) some speakers tend to  use low and /or high pitches to meet certain pragmatic forces.