Pragmatics and Ideology: Speech Acts in Toru Dutt's the Lotus

This study conducted an analysis of how speech acts in Toru Dutt’s sonnet, "The Lotus," operated at an ideological level, addressing a discrepancy between symbolic interpretations and pragmatics-based analysis. It evaluated how Searlean illocutionary categories were distributed between the octave and sestet, how illocutionary forces and perlocutionary emphasis indicated an ideology about cultural hierarchy and membership, using inquiries, assertion-evaluation, and expressive performatives, while using a postcolonial pragmatic approach that posited a transformed perspective about how data about symbolism alone could be interpreted. This qualitative, descriptive analysis used a coding manual, NVivo audit trail, and Cohen’s kappa evaluation, which helped validate the analysis. The process used a six-stage data collection process that included authoritative text retrieval, segmentation, pilot analysis, final analysis, and data triangulation. An analysis from locutionary segmentation through Searlean categorization helped create a CDA mapping. It was revealed that assertive statements were more commonly found in the octave, inquiries mediated contestations, while expressive statements were found more commonly in the sestet, and that inter-researcher reliability was above kappa = .81. This study asserted that speech-act analysis could help understand micro-analytical mechanisms, including ideology, that were performatized and that a replicable model enhanced and replaced symbolic interpretations about Indo-Anglian poems.