ANALYZING POLITICAL DISCOURSE AS A MACRO SPEECH ACT

By analysing several partisan political speeches delivered by Romanian Members of the Parliament (MPs) in a session dedicated to the debate and vote of investiture for a new government (28.12.2004), the paper aims at demonstrating their role as macro speech acts. The corpus covers complex discursive functions (agenda setting, debates, decision making, or proclaiming), suitable for both a quantitative analysis (the frequency of speech acts, according to Searle's (1969) typology, for each category of speakers) and a qualitative one (how the macro speech act is built by means of political speeches). The distribution of the speech acts is correlated with the communicative strategies assigned to each role (the chair, the designated Prime Minister, the MPs from the government coalition, the MPs from the opposition, others). The discussion focuses on ways in which politicians do complex identity work (building and maintaining personal, group, and institutional identity), manage face-work, and construct power relations.