Authors : Ibiam, Ibiam Kalu

Volume/Issue : Volume 11 - 2026, Issue 9 - September

Google Scholar : https://tinyurl.com/yv5mmj9e

DOI : https://doi.org/10.38124/ijisrt/26sep321

Note : A published paper may take 4-5 working days from the publication date to appear in PlumX Metrics, Semantic Scholar, and ResearchGate.

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.

Keywords : Pragmatics, Speech Acts, Political Discourse, Sam Ominyi Egwu, Ebonyi State, Illocutionary Force.

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