An Analysis of Illocutionary Acts Used in Joe Biden’s Presidential Speech 2024

Abstract

Political leaders are synonymous with state leaders and always deliver speeches at meetings and during certain activities. The speech delivered contains certain goals and meanings. In this research, the researcher focuses on Joe Biden's 2024 presidential speech with the aim of researching and finding types of speech acts in the speech because speech cannot be separated from linguistics, and one of the most appropriate subjects is speech acts in the study of pragmatics. In this study, there is a subsection that focuses on illocutionary speech acts. In Joe Biden's speech, researchers used the illocutionary theory based on its function by Leech (1983), where there are 4 main types, namely collaborative, competitive, convivial, and conflictive, to determine the type of illocutionary act contained in Joe Biden's speech and look for the dominant type used in his speech. In this study, researchers used a qualitative descriptive method with observation and documentation of Joe Biden's speech. After applying data collection and analysis techniques, the researchers found that the four types of illocutionary act functions were present in Joe Biden's speech. The data found were 94 illocutionary acts, of which 45(47,8%) were collaborative, 24(25,8%)were competitive, 13(13,8%) were convivial, and 12(12,8%) were conflictive. The most dominant use in Joe Biden's speech is collaborative.