The Speech Act of Promise and Promise in Political Discourse

The speech act of promise can be accompanied by two other speech acts: encouragement and pledge. Since, in this speech act, we have the concept of volunteer promise, and the speaker willingly makes a commitment to his/her addressee, according to George Austin's typology of speech acts, this speech act is considered to be an instance of commissive speech acts. Moreover, since the main features of performative verbs, i.e. “I, you, here and now”, are present in promises, promise is also regarded as a performative act. In political promises, given the objectives of the discourse as well as the personal traits of the speaker, Grice's maxims – quality, quantity, relevance and manner – may be violated. In a political promise, there may be as much brevity as there is repetition. Most of political promises serve merely as advertising goals and are not intended to be fulfilled. The maxim of relevance is generally heeded in political promises and the violation of this maxim before elections is fairly rare. Political activists usually make use of efficient and influential manner of speech in their election campaigns.