Rethink expressive Speech Acts. The emotional Dimension in Protesting in German and in Arabic – A Study of Public Protests through the Micro-blogging Platform Twitter

Abstract

The Research of the language use in protesting is still a new Research field of the Applied Linguistics. In this contribution I would like to cast light on the emotional dimension in protesting in both German and Arabic, especially on the expressive speech acts in protesting. In the beginning I will introduce “protest” as a “macro speech act” with an open class of supportive speech acts. Thereafter, I come to investigate the term of “expressive speech acts” as suggested by Austin and Searle, and coin my own German term of “emotional geprägte Sprechakte” (= emotionally charged Speech acts) and revising in this way the theory of speech act itself. The German and Arabic corpus is elicited from protest platforms on Twitter. In this paper I analyze the emotionally charged speech acts, reconstruct the emotions which these acts reflect and finally classify their direction: self-centered, claim-centered or other-centered.