PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF ALLAMA MUHAMMAD IQBAL’S LETTER TO MUHAMMAD ALI JINNAH: A STUDY OF SPEECH ACTS

Abstract

A politician may express his or her political thoughts and narratives in the form of letters. The politician’s letter may include various speech acts. Those speech acts can be used for various purposes such as revealing their political thoughts and ideology. Keeping this notion in view, this paper intends to analyze Allama Muhammad Iqbal’s letter to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, posted on May 28, 1937. This letter is selected using purposive sampling as Iqbal wrote many letters to Jinnah during pre-partition of Pakistan and India. The analysis of the letter is carried out both qualitatively and quantitatively. Qualitative analysis includes identifying the various types of speech acts in the letter employing Searle’s (1969) taxonomy of illocutionary acts. Qualitative analysis shows that speech acts are used for various purposes such as stating, concluding, directing, planning, expressing, and showing attitude. Quantitative analysis includes frequency (number) distribution of speech acts through column chart. This analysis highlights that representative act dominates the letter, follows by directive, commissive, and expressive act. It is also noted that no declarative act is found in the letter.  This paper is significant in a sense as it analyzes the language of a politician used in their letters in the light of speech acts. This paper encourages the pragmatists to use various other pragmatic tools of inquiry such as explicature and implicature, deixis, presupposition, etc. In addition, it invites the future researchers to analyzes these letters in the light of several other perspectives such as discourse analysis, systemic functional linguistics, morphology, syntax, and semantics.