Exploring the Speech Acts of Exclusionary Utterances in American Political Speeches

Abstract

Verbal exclusion refers to a range of linguistic practices that sustain power dynamics and social inequality. It includes behaviors like linguistic discrimination, name-calling, stereotyping, and disparaging words that uphold social hierarchies or express power. The goal of the current study is to detect and pragmatically analyze spoken instances of verbal exclusion in American political speeches. The study attempts to pinpoint the speech acts that constitute verbal exclusion, the purposes of verbal exclusion, and the specific form of verbal exclusion that is most frequently employed by US politicians. The four texts from American speeches from 2011 to 2017 are the subject of the analysis. The study concludes that Verbal exclusion is used mainly to fulfil the function of identity construction. Lexical exclusion is commonly used by American politicians.