Speech Act Categorization in Political Discourse: A Pragmatic Investigation of Sam Ominyi Egwu’s Gubernatorial Speeches

Abstract

Political discourse functions far beyond the passive transmission of institutional information; it is fundamentally a performative act engineered for persuasion, identity construction, ideological alignment, and democratic mobilization. Grounded in Searle’s (1969) taxonomy of speech acts, this study investigates how illocutionary forces are strategically deployed in the gubernatorial speeches of Dr. Sam Ominyi Egwu, the first Executive Governor of Ebonyi State, Nigeria, as compiled in the text “A Challenge to My Generation” (2005). Adopting a quantitative and qualitative corpus-based descriptive methodology, the study extracted and analyzed 100 distinct utterances drawn from 10 selected speeches using Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices (IFIDs) as the primary analytical tool for categorization.