Direct Speech Acts in Chetan Bhagat's Five Selected Novels

Human beings use language not merely to exhibit their knowledge but to achieve goals and accomplish some specific acts. An utterance constitutes a speech act. A speech act is an act performed by speaking something in a particular context with respect to a listener. Speech acts are different from other social or instrumental acts though they include certain social conventions. This is because of the reason that speech acts use language to achieve certain conversational goals . Every utterance in a prescribed novel is used with a set purpose in order to perform a set of functions. Behind every utterance in a selected novel, there is a communicative goal to be achieved. The speech act analysis of individual utterances in a selected novel in terms of the contexts in which they are used, the immediate context and a larger context can offer a wide range of explanatory possibilities about the intentions and purposes of the character as well as authorial intentions and purposes in producing those utterances.