Direct and indirect speech acts in a man for all seasons

Speech act is an utterance often made by a speaker not only to present information, but to perform an action as well. In this study, speakers employ naturally occurring conversations not only to present information, but to perform actions also. Dialogues in Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons could be categorised as naturally occurring conversations because they involve two or more characters who take turn to chat on issues that are linked to King Henry’s desire to divorce Queen Catherine and marry Ann. So, as essential as speech act is in using naturally occurring dialogues to present information and perform actions, no enough scholarly attention has been given to it. Therefore, this paper seeks to explore direct and indirect speech acts in the aforementioned text to see how they are being used. The paper adopts as its theoretical framework Austin’s speech act model which was later developed by Searle. The data for the study were analysed taking cognizance of the topic of the study that is direct and indirect speech acts. Direct speech act such as declarative constructions, interrogative constructions and imperative constructions are used in the text. Indirect speech acts such as interrogative constructions used to make request, and declarative constructions employed to make request, are also found in the text. The study concludes that speech act model is an essential tool in studying direct and indirect speech acts.