Speech Acts in UN Treaties: A Pragmatic Perspective

This paper investigates the linguistic behavior, especially the illocutionary forces used in international conventions formulation discourses. It cuts across pragmatics and law—the illocutionary act and a particular register of legal text. Illocution is a dimension of speech act theory which stands for the intention inherent in spoken or written utterances. For extended analysis, a couple of other discursive variables are added. One is mood, a concept borrowed from Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics which maintains that there are basically three types of mood in English language: declarative for statement, imperative for command and interrogative for question. The other is speech act type. Based on Searle’s classification, there are assertive, commissive, representative, directive and expressive. The questions discussed are: 1) What types of illocutionary acts are found in the discourse of U.N. treaties? 2) To what extent are they used? 3) How do those types of illocutionary acts reflect the nature of discourse pattern of a treaty? The data reveal that there is not an exclusive use of a single speech act type. However, there is a higher frequency of constitutive and commissive categories whereas the directive is only used to a lesser extent. This high frequency of commissive and constitutive is understood as a reflection of the nature of a treaty that is not so much about a command as it is about commitment and clear definitions of the relative terms.