With the increase and popularity of the use of internet, hate speech has reached wider dimensions in societies. This thesis will provide empirical examples to show the relation between speech and actions. This paper will use speech-act theory and social movement theory to portray the relation between hate speech on social media and domestic terrorism inspired by far right extremist. Even though, there has been a lot of work for counter terrorism, domestic terrorism is still overlooked. Empirical sources say that domestic terrorism poses a threat as much as international terrorism. This thesis will bring light over the connections of hate speech and domestic terrorism inspired by far right extremists. It will conclude that there is an evident relation that hate speech on social media is contributing to domestic terrorism actions encouraged by far right extremism.

Die folgende Arbeit macht es sich zur Aufgabe, die Übertragbarkeit der Sprechakttheorie nach Austin und Searle auf komplexe aktuelle politikwissenschaftliche Kommunikationssituationen zu untersuchen. Im ersten Teil der Arbeit werden die Grundlagen und Implikationen der Sprechakttheorie analysiert und erklärt. Daran anschließend erfolgt ein Transfer grundlegender Überlegungen der Sprechakttheorie auf den politikwissenschaftlichen Kontext. Hierbei soll die Übertragbarkeit der Sprechakttheorie auf komplexe politische Kommunikationsprozesse am Beispiel des performativen Selbstwiderspruchs deutlich gemacht werden. Ziel der Arbeit ist es, die Bedeutsamkeit der Sprechakttheorie anhand konkreter Beispiele differenziert zu reflektieren. Dabei soll der performative Selbstwiderspruch, der eine Verbindung zur Lehre von Austin und Searle besitzt, eine zentrale Rolle spielen.

(in English): This thesis focuses on pragmatic competence of Czech students of Japanese, specifically on the speech act of refusal. The aim is to find out how students differ in comparison to native speakers of Japanese. Another aim is to compare Japanese students based on the length of their stay in Japan, their Japanese proficiency, and the textbook used at the beginner level. The theoretical part describes pragmatic competence, politeness theory, the speech act of refusal and its specifics in Japanese. The practical part focuses at the analysis of refusals from the Discourse Completion Task (DCT) using semantic formulas. Usage of these formulas by native speakers and student are then compared. Found differences from the native speakers are further examined among students according to Japanese proficiency, length of their stay in Japan and textbook used at the begginer level. Finally, the results are summarized.

Road signs form a non-verbal semiotic system – by many encountered on a daily basis – that dictates the actions of the users of the road, in order to create a safe and efficient traffic environment. It is clear that road signs are not just ‘saying’ things but ‘doing’ something. This study examines the commanding and performative aspects of a set of Swedish road signs. The first part of the analysis is a detailed investigation of (the ‘grammar’ of) the warning sign, drawing on a theoretical framework of semiotics and Grice’s cooperative principle. The second part investigates the speech act status of warning signs, priority signs and prohibitory signs, by applying Searle’s taxonomy of illocutionary acts. Results show that the warning triangle is not arbitrary but iconically motivated, both in color and in form, and that the silhouettes vary on a number of parameters, including the perspective of their mapping, the degree of iconicity and the degree of ‘danger reality’. Warning signs, just like verbal warnings, are best categorized as directives, whereas priority and prohibitory signs, unlike verbal prohibitions, emerge as declarations. Ultimately, this raises questions regarding the limits of and the ‘translatability’ between verbal and non-verbal language.

The aim of this paper is to find out whether the securitization theory of the Copenhagen School is applicable outside euro-american space. This topic is chosen because of the contradicting opinions of theorists regarding the universality of the theory. Many authors criticize also the disregard of the process, context, pictures or physical actions. The theory is applied in societal sector in Egypt on nine cases including human rights non-governmental organizations, political opponents, critics and asylum seekers. The development of securitization, implementation of extraordinary measures, results and impact of the securitization are monitored in these cases. Attention is paid also to the fact whether securitization took into consideration context, process and whether pictures and physical actions played any role and what role it was. Method used in the paper is instrumental case study. It aims at the explanation of narrowly defined case on the basis of the theory. In the stated cases the threats to identity are presented as "others", alien and with the exception of one case as "Western" which means different from the Egyptian identity. The implementation of extraordinary measures to deal with the threats then becomes legitimate. The main contribution of the paper is the finding that the...

This essay provides an analysis of five examples of written feedback on a speech assignment completed for an English as a foreign language (EFL) class by second-year students of upper secondary school. The essay aims to shed light on how feedback is formulated and how it is interpreted as a part of a textual dialogue between teacher and student. The analysis focuses on three separate sources of data: an interview with the students, examples of feedback and a short teacher interview. This dataset provides an insight to the process of the students’ reception and interpretation of the feedback and allows an analysis of the correspondence between what the teacher tries to communicate and what the students in their turn understand from the feedback. Two theories applied in this research include 1) attribution theory and 2) speech act theory, which attempt to show how the students reflect on their achievements and apply feedback to their own development. The feedback is interpreted on two different occasions. First, the textual feedback was coded, and an analysis model was developed based on two characteristics of in-text feedback: directive and expressive functions. The findings suggest that more specific feedback should be provided, and a deeper awareness among teachers of how students interpret their feedback would aid the students’ learning process. / <p>The presentation was held online due to Corona.</p>

This essay utilizes Speech Act Theory to assess Donald Trump’s role in inciting the riot that took place in Washington D.C. on the 6th of January, 2021 and culminated with the attack on the Capitol building. For the purposes of the study a corpus was created with tweets collected from the Trump Twitter Archive. The tweets cover the span between the latest presidential election, on the 3rd of November, 2020, to the day of the attack. The corpus was read manually and sorted into themes. The themes that emerged show that: a) Trump was convinced of his victory, b) felt that the election was rigged, c) accused news networks, the Democrats and even prominent Republicans for his loss, and d) called the people for action. A quantitative method that identified the most common words in the corpus corroborated the identification of the described themes. The themes were compared to Speech Act Theory’s felicitous conditions for directive speech acts. The study found that Trump’s tweets satisfy the conditions for the successful directive speech acts of Order and Command, thus providing grounds to make the case that he was responsible for inciting the attack.

A small but important set of studies on complaint speech acts have been focused on certain aspects of native speaker (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS) complaints such as strategy use and native speaker judgment, (Du, 1995; House & Kasper, 1981; Morrow, 1995; Murphy & Neu, 1996; Olshtein & Weinbach, 1987; Trosborg, 1995). However, few researchers have comprehensively researched complaint interactions. Complaining to the person responsible for the complainable (as opposed to complaining about a third party or situation) is a particularly face-threatening speech act, with social norms that vary from culture to culture. This study was an investigation of how Japanese and Americans express their dissatisfaction to those who caused it in their native language and in the target language (Japanese or English). The data analyzed are from the role-play performances of four situations by ten dyads in each of four groups (native speakers of Japanese speaking Japanese to a Japanese (JJJ), native speakers of English speaking English to an American (EEE), native speakers of Japanese speaking English to a native speaker of English (JEE), and native speakers of English speaking Japanese to a native speaker of Japanese (EJJ). The complaint categories used in this study represent a pared-down version of Trosborg's (1995) categories based on two criteria: (a) hinting or mentioning complainable and (b) negative assessment of the complainer's action or of the complainer as a person. The following characteristics of the complaint interactions were analyzed: (a) the length of interactions in terms of the number of turns, (b) complaint strategies used by complainers, (c) initial complaint strategies used by complainers, (d) the comparison of S1Hint and S2Cmpl as the initial position, (e) interaction flow in terms of complaint severity levels, 6) strategies employed by complainees, and (f) flow of complaint interactions between complainers and complainees. The results indicate some differences between the groups of native speakers of English and Japanese in the length of their interactions and the use of strategies by complainers and complainees. In general, complaint sequences in English were shorter, and the complaint strategies used by the JJJ group were less indirect than those used by the EEE group. Several prototypical complaint sequences are described. Concerning the use of strategies, the JEE and EJJ groups used strategies more in line with those employed by target language speakers, rather than by speakers of their own language. An attempt is made to account for the different characteristics of English and Japanese complaints in terms of linguistic resources. Pedagogical implications are also highlighted. / CITE/Language Arts

Cette recherche porte sur l’acte d’invitation au mariage eta pour but,d’abord, de révéler les caractéristiques de tel acte dans les cartes d’invitation en français et en vietnamien puis d’identifier des ressemblances et des différences qui sont culturellement déterminées. Pour ce faire, nous avons décrit la formulation et le fonctionnement pragmatique des cartes d’invitation au mariage dans les deux langues du point de vue de la politesse linguistique. Le résultat de l’analyse nous a permis, par la suite, d’identifierles particularités dans la formulation des cartes ainsi que dansles stratégies de politesse privilégiées dans les deux communautés française et vietnamienne. Cette étude nous amène à conclure qu’à la différence de l’individualité qui caractérise la culture occidentale y compriscelle de la France, les Vietnamiens, de tradition de riziculture, mettent beaucoup plus d’importance sur le respect de l’honneur, et ont peur de perdre la face, de faire perdre celle de l’autre, d’être différents des autres, d’être hors du commun. Par conséquent,ils optent très souvent pour des modèles traditionnels de cartes d’invitation sans trop d’éléments de personnalisation et privilégient la politesse positive. / This research on the act of invitation to marriage aims to find out the characteristics of this act in invitation cards in French and Vietnamese, then to reveal the resemblances and the differences which are culturally determined. For this purpose, we described the formulation and the pragmatic functioning of invitation cards to marriage in the view of linguistic politeness. The analysis result allowed us then to exploit the particularities in the formulation of cards as well as the strategies of politeness privileged in French and Vietnamese communities. We concluded that unlike the individuality that characterises Occidental cultures including French culture, Vietnamese people of rice culture attach more importance to the respect of honor and are afraid of losing face, making others lose face, being different from others, or not being in common with them. As a consequence, they often choose traditional models of invitation cards without insisting too much on the personalisation and they privilege the positive politeness.

The thesis explores the form, function and sociolinguistic distribution of explicit apologies in the spoken part of the British National Corpus. The sub-corpus used for the study comprises a spoken text mass of about five million words and represents dialogue produced by more than 1700 speakers, acting in a number of different conversational settings. More than 3000 examples of apologising are included in the analysis. Primarily, the form and function of the apologies are examined in relation to the type of offence leading up to the speech act. Aspects such as the sincerity of the apologies and the use of additional remedial strategies other than explicit apologising are also considered. Variations in the distributions of the different types of apologies found are subsequently investigated for the two independent variables speaker social identity (gender, social class and age) and conversational setting (genre, formality and group size). The effect of the speaker-addressee relationship on the apology rate and the types of apologies produced is also examined. In this study, the prototypical apology, a speech act used to remedy a real or perceived offence, is only one of a number of uses of the apology form in the corpus. Other common functions of the form include discourse-managing devices such as request cues for repetition and markers of hesitation, as well as disarming devices uttered before expressing disagreement and controversial opinions. Among the speaker social variables investigated, age and social class are particularly important in affecting apologetic behaviour. Young and middle-class speakers favour the use of the apology form. No substantial gender differences in apologising are apparent in the corpus. I have also been able to show that large conversational groups result in frequent use of the form. Finally, analysis of the effects of the speaker-addressee relationship on the use of the speech act shows that, contrary to expectations based on Brown &amp; Levinson’s theory of politeness, it is the powerful who tend to apologise to the powerless rather than vice versa. The study implies that formulaic politeness is an important linguistic marker of social class and that its use often involves control of the addressee.