Explicit Illocutionary Acts in Legislative Discourse

The fundamental role of legislators is to make laws which would bring about positive changes in the lives of the electorates whom they represent. Consequently, it is expected that every legislator’s utterances are made with the intention to bring about a “change in the existing state of affairs” in the country. One linguistic theory which has demonstrated that speaking is acting is Speech Act Theory. This theory states that speakers perform three communicative acts: locutionary, illocutionary and performative acts. Illocutionary acts could be performed either implicitly or explicity. Therefore, using Speech Act Theory, this study sets out to identify and explain the various illocutionary acts performed by Nigerian legislators during bill debates. The data for the analysis were taken from Nigeria Senate Hansard of the 6th National Assembly. The study is constrained by the fact that the Hansard which is a verbatim recordings of the senate official interactions is devoid of phonological and other non- verbal pragmatic clues. The study reveals that Nigerian legislators perform mostly four types of explicit illocutionary acts – representative, affective, effective and conditional acts. The study concludes that the speakers’ utterances are characterized by two levels: surface and deep levels. The surface level of the locution is the act of representative, affective, effective and conditional and the deep level is the act of persuading the other senators to accept the speaker’s view on the topic of discussion.

Key words: language communicative acts, speech acts, performative utterance, linguistic tool, sentence function.