الإصدار 6 - العدد 17 (2026-08-20)

Speech Acts in English WhatsApp and Private Messaging: A Pragmatic Investigation of Semi-Private Digital Discourse

Asst. Lect: Ahmed Mahdi Salih Al-Khuzaai

Directorate General of Salahaddin Education – Ministry of Education

The present study analyzes how speech acts are pragmatically organized in WhatsApp conversations that are taking place in different versions of English due to them being conducted through a site that impinge on semi-private digital discourses. There are (844) instances of naturally occurring talk recorded from (60) dyadic and group chats. All of these conversations were analyzed according to (1) Austin's (1962) performative framework; (2) Searle's (1969) illocutionary taxonomy; (3) Brown & Levinson's (1987) politeness theory; and (4) Herring's (2007) (CMDA) and (5) Page et al.'s (2014) social media language analysis frameworks. The quantitative frequency analysis was triangulated with a qualitative discursive analysis of selected exchanges to elucidate the distributional, realization strategies and pragmatic functions of directives, expressive, commissive, assertive and declaration speech acts. The findings indicate that the semi-private architecture of WhatsApp encourages the direct and phatic forms of communication while facilitating the performance of face-threatening acts that would have otherwise been mitigated in formal registers. Additionally, the using of multimodal resources, such as emoji, GIF and voice notes, are a systematic co-construction of illocutionary force. Lastly, the study introduces the term distributed illocution to explain how a single speech act may be distributed across non-continuous message units within asynchronous threads. The implications of this study are relevant to areas such as digital pragmatics, second language pragmatic competence, and forensic linguistics.