The weakness of Searle’s promissive acts in electoral political discourse

Abstract

This article identifies the weakness of promissive acts as conceived in classical pragmatics, which are deployed only on language as their own object. Language sciences consider the speech act as the simple act of stating linguistic propositions. In politics, politically relevant statements become a political act once they have been put into practice and evaluated by the addressees. Having spoken does not mean having finished acting. A pragmatic schema of electoral political discourse is proposed to restore mutual trust between political actors and their constituents.