Speech Acts and Character Intentions

Analyzing Speech Acts in Novels: A Study of Na‟ima B. Robert's Boy vs. Girl and She Wore Red Trainers

• Language is crucial for communication and is used to perform actions through speech acts.
• Pragmatics is the study of how language is used in social interaction, including speech acts.
• Speech act theory is a subtopic of pragmatics that deals with the meaning of an act performed in the speaker's utterance in a particular context.
• Austin's speech act theory includes locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts.
• The novels Boy vs. Girl and She Wore Red Trainers by Na‟ima B. Robert challenge stereotypes and address conflicts of freedom, temptations, and faith among young Muslims in Britain.
• Speech act theory can be useful in interpreting the context-bound speech acts of characters in novels.
• This study aims to investigate the illocutionary forces and perlocutionary effects of speech acts performed by characters in the two selected novels.
• The study seeks to identify illocutionary speech acts and their forces, investigate the extent to which they are used, and examine the perlocutionary effects on listeners' responses.
• The study will apply speech act theory to reveal the intended meaning of the characters' utterances.
• The analysis of the selected novels can provide insight into the characters' behaviors, attitudes, relationships, intentions, and the writer's point of view.
• The study is limited to two novels by one writer, and the findings may be useful for evaluating other literary works and for further research in this area.
• The study is the first to touch on this topic in both novels and is expected to provide a useful academic reference. The study will be divided into six chapters, including an introduction, literature review, methodology, analysis, findings, and conclusion with suggestions for further research.