Mind Your Language—Every Word Has a Consequence: Speech Act Theory in Shakespeare’s King Lear and King Richard III, with a Focus on Curses and Insults
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63356/stes.hum.2025.002Keywords:
speech act theory, literary dialogue, J. L. Austin, pragmatics, illocutionary actAbstract
Introduction: Everything we say bears with it certain meanings and brings forth reactions and emotions, which is exactly the fundamental purpose of a language. While communicating, our utterances often take the shape of an apology, a promise, an order, a request, an appeal, a warning, an invitation, a refusal, or a compliment, and all the while we remain completely unaware that these are the true speech acts that keep communication strong. The first to write about them was John L. Austin, an Oxford philosopher, in his ”How to Do Things with Words” (1962), which paved the way for a new branch in pragmatics—the speech act theory. He makes a distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, while the American philosopher John Searle develops a classification comprising five illocutionary types: assertives, commissives, directives,
expressives, and declaratives.
Aim: This paper aims to, based on both approaches, analyze speech acts in Shakespeare’s plays in hopes of better understanding the meanings and actions of their characters.
Materials and Methods: The corpus includes ”King Richard III” and ”King Lear” by William Shakespeare. The analysis was conducted both qualitatively and quantitatively, with a total of 40 examples collected and categorized, and the results are also presented graphically for clearer insight.
Results: The analysis showed that directives and expressives dominate most of the dialogues, while commissives appear more frequently in key emotional scenes. Assertives play an important role in shaping the narrative flow, whereas declarations occur less often, mainly in pivotal moments.
Conclusion: The obtained results confirm that every word has a consequence and that the way it is spoken alters its impact. The perception of literary characters depends not only on the plot but also on our interpretation of the dialogue, which relies significantly on speech act theory.
