Views: 517
Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Volume 17. Number 2, June 2026 Pp. 450-482
Department of English, College of Education for Humanities, University of Anbar, Ramadi, Iraq
Department of English, College of Education for Humanities, University of Anbar, Ramadi, Iraq
Department of English, College of Foreign Studies, Guilin University of Technology, Guilin, China.
Despite growing interest in political discourse and prosodic pragmatics, integrated phono-pragmatic analysis of speech acts and intonation in political interviews remains underexplored, especially in Brexit discourse. This study aims to investigate the phono-pragmatic realization of speech acts in Brexit interviews with Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. The study is significant because it links pragmatic force with prosodic realization and shows how political meaning is strategically constructed in institutional media discourse. Using a qualitative design, the study examines forty excerpts, twenty from each interview. These excerpts were selected because they contain coherent speech-act sequences, while isolated words and disconnected utterances were excluded. The unit of analysis is the excerpt-level speech-act sequence, with the main speech act used for tone analysis. It applies an eclectic model integrating Searle’s (1969) speech act taxonomy, Ferrara’s (1980) discourse-functional relations, and Brazil’s (1997) discourse intonation model. Praat was used to identify falling, rising, fall-rise, and rise-fall tonal contours. Findings reveal that assertive acts predominate in both interviews, accounting for 68.97% and 64.95% of May’s and Corbyn’s speech acts, respectively, followed by commissives and directives. Expressives remain marginal, and declaratives are absent. Subordinate acts mainly operate through justification and amplification. Both speakers prefer proclaiming tones. May uses falling and rise-fall contours more evenly, indicating institutional control. Corbyn relies heavily on rise-fall patterns, producing a more emphatic rhetorical style. The analysis shows that intonation actively regulates illocutionary force. These results suggest that a phono-pragmatic framework offers a useful perspective for analyzing strategic spoken communication in institutional media discourse.
Abd Al- Karim, Y. Y., Mohammed, F. J., & Geng, H. (2026). A Phono-Pragmatic Analysis of Speech Acts in Political Interviews: Evidence from Brexit Discourse. Arab World English Journal, 17(2): 450-482
Al-Jumaily, N. S. K., Ahmed, M. S., & Geng, H. (2026). Intonation attitudinal function of directive speech acts used by Iraqi university students of English. Arab World English Journal, 17(1), 116–138. https://doi.org/10.24093/awej/vol17no1.8
Alroumi, A. (2025). Equivocation in media communication: An analysis of Adel Al-Jubeir’s interviews as a case study. Journal of Language and Politics, 24(4), 650–674. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.24009.alr
Alrufaiey, H. S., & Alrikabi, A. A. (2024). A pragmatic analysis of effective political communication from a relevance-theoretic perspective. Arab World English Journal, 15(1), 91–116. https://doi.org/10.24093/awej/vol15no1.7
Artero Abellán, P. A. (2025). Intonation and emotional framing in political rallies: A multimodal approach to populist political speech. Language & Communication, 105, 10–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2025.08.003
Azam, S., Qazi, M. H., & Saleem, T. (2025). Analyzing intonational variation and pragmatic strategies in high-imposition requests and refusals by L1 and L2 speakers. Corpus Pragmatics, 9, 367–389. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-025-00195-4
Brazil, D. (1997). The communicative value of intonation in English. Cambridge University Press.
Brusenbauch Meislová, M. (2025). Discourse of self-legitimation: Self- and other-presentation in the European Parliament’s soft law on Brexit. Journal of Language and Politics, 24(4), 545–569. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.24010.bru
Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (Eds.). (2017). The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.
Feldman, O. (2022). Introduction: Political interviews—An analytical model. In Adversarial political interviewing: Worldwide perspectives during polarized times (pp. 1-21). Springer Nature Singapore.
Ferrara, A. (1980). An extended theory of speech acts: Appropriateness conditions for subordinate acts in sequences. Journal of Pragmatics, 4(3), 233–252. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(80)90038-7
Fu, Y., Afzaal, M., & El-Dakhs, D. A. S. (2024). Investigating discourse markers “you know” and “I mean” in mediatized English political interviews: A corpus-based comparative study. Frontiers in Communication, 9, Article 1427062. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2024.1427062
Kampf, Z. (2021). Political speech acts in contrast: The case of calls to condemn in news interviews. Journal of Pragmatics, 180, 203–218. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.04.031
Kazemian, R., Amouzadeh, M., & Asadi, H. (2025). The interface of prosody and pragmatics: A phono-pragmatic analysis of bebin (‘look’) in Persian. Language & Communication. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2025.06.004
Lewiński, M., Cepollaro, B., Oswald, S., & Witek, M. (2023). Norms of public argument: A speech act perspective. Topoi, 42, 349–356. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09918-1
Naait, S. A., & Alshimmary, I. M. (2024). A metapragmatic analysis of Iraqi and American political legal discourse. Arab World English Journal, 15(1), 56–76. https://doi.org/10.24093/awej/vol15no1.5
Nurmaganbetova, A., Akhmetova, A., Konyrbayeva, S., Saktaganova, T., Zhumasheva, S., Mongileva, N., & Kolomiets, O. (2025). Praise strategies and tactics in US political interviews with Donald Trump. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 38, 2319–2340. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-025-10301-z
Romero-Trillo, J., & Sadeghi, Y. (2023). Prosodic pragmatics in context. In J. Romero-Trillo (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of language in context (pp. 314–328). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108989275.015
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge University Press.
Shitwi, Z. H., Ali, Z. A., & Khalil, J. A. (2019). The use of information tones in Obama’s speech: A phono-pragmatic analysis. Arab World English Journal, 10(3), 271–286. https://doi.org/10.24093/awej/vol10no3.18
Steffman, J., Cole, J., & Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (2024). Intonational categories and continua in American English rising nuclear tunes. Journal of Phonetics, 104, Article 101310. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2024.101310
Sun, J., & Liu, Z. (2023). Evaluation mechanism of political discourse: A holistic approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 52, 2143–2179. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-09988-7
Wennerstrom, A. (2001). The music of everyday speech: Prosody and discourse analysis. Oxford University Press.
Yasmeen Yousif Abd Al- Karim is a Master’s student in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Anbar, College of Education for Humanities, Ramadi, Iraq. https://orcid.org/0009-0009-9073-3331.
Fuad Jassim Mohammed is an experienced professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Anbar, College of Education for Humanities. He has extensive teaching experience in Phonetics and Phonology.
https://orcid.org/ 0000-0002-9102-8257
Hui Geng holds a Ph.D. in English Language from Universiti Putra Malaysia and is currently a senior lecturer at Guilin University of Technology, China. Her research interests include corpus linguistics, academic writing, creative writing, EAP/ESP, discourse analysis, language assessment, education, and translation. She serves as copy editor for the International Journal of Education and Literacy Studies (IJELS) and assistant editor for the ASEAN Journal of Applied Linguistics (ASJAL). She has translated two books, edited two books, and published several articles in SSCI- and AHCI-indexed journals. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9136-5264