Mohammad Javad Pourabed

Speech acts form the backbone of pragmatic studies, which focus on language use in real-world contexts by examining the relationship between utterances, listeners, and the surrounding discourse circumstances. John Austin established this concept when he distinguished between constative utterances (which describe facts) and performative utterances (which create new realities merely by being uttered). John Searle later developed the theory, classifying speech acts into five main types: assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declaratives.The poet Sulaiman al-Nabhani was selected as a vital space for speech acts, having transformed the word from a tool of description into a weapon for social reform, identity consolidation, and authority assertion. The research adopted a pragmatic methodology that monitors linguistic features in poetic texts and analyzes them through the lens of pragmatic theory. Key findings revealed the dominance of directives and declaratives in al-Nabhani’s poetry, with clear integration among various speech act types to achieve diverse communicative goals. The analysis also uncovered the role of socio-political context in enhancing the illocutionary force of speech acts in his work.