Pragmatic Analysis of News Reports on Coronavirus from Selected National and International Newspapers

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic led to various scholarly studies both from scientific and linguistic repertoires. This study is a pragmatic analysis of news reports on Coronavirus from selected national and international newspapers from the point of view of Austin (1962) and Searle's (1969) Speech Act Theory. A total of 40 utterances were purposively sampled from the four newspapers (Vanguard, Daily Sun, The New York Times and The Guardian). Qualitative research design was used for the data analysis. The qualitative analysis discussed the aspects of the Speech Act Theory: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary. From the analysis, it is obvious that the newspaper media used more of assertives, as they majorly report, inform and assert the state of affairs in their reports on covid-19.