A Pragma-stylistic Analysis of Promising in Political Discourse

This study investigates the use of the promise speech act in political discourse from a pragma-stylistic perspective. To
do so, the researchers examine two political speeches “President-elect Joe Biden’s victory speech” and “Justin Trudeau’s victory
speech” and then made a comparison between them. The data are analyzed by using an eclectic model: a combination of Searl’s
(1965, 1989) model and Sihite's (2019) model. The study is descriptive and qualitative, since it does not deal with statistics and
numbers. After applying the two models, the researchers found that both prime ministers use certain words to convey the act of
promising such as the auxiliary “will” or by using the implied promise act which is used only by the American prime minister; he
uses this style two times throughout the analyzed extracts. The researchers also found that both prime ministers use certain
stylistic strategies to achieve their goals such as repetition which occurs twice in Trudeau’s speech, parallelism and fronting which
appear twice in Biden’s speech. The research also shows that both prime ministers use active voice, and informal dialect, they do
so to achieve their purposes.