Beggars' Register in Muzaffarabad: A Semantic Analysis

The aim of the study is to analyse semantically, the various levels of speech acts performed by the beggars under the speech act theory. For understanding the real sense of communicative acts and functions, I focus on speech acts which consist of meaningful utterances, phrases, sentences and paragraphs. Notion of speech acts have been classified and sub-classified by liguists for interpreting, understanding and enriching language. For this purpose, primary and secondary data of 22 subjects have been collected for analyzing under qualitative research design. The participants consisted of 10 males and 11 females and a pair of euniuch. The result shows the universality of the frame work, which indicates that different types of speech acts are performed by the beggars but the dominant one is perlocutionary act, effect or force, which basically is an impact on the hearers for encouraging, persuading and warning, etc. Under the influence of beggars' perlocutionary acts, the public pays alms and charity for the progress, welfare, success, and safety of their families. The results show that perlocutionary effect is the core act of the subjects of focused area.

Autorentext

Saleem Akhtar is associate professor at Govt. Post Graduate college for Boys Muzaffarabad. He has done his M.Phil in Linguistics from the University of Azad Jammu & Kashmir. His area of interest is Semantics, Pragmatics and Second Language Acquisition.