1. Introduction
The Palestine issue has remained one of the enduring concerns in Middle Eastern politics and the discourse of the Islamic world. Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Palestine has occupied a prominent position in the country’s official discourse and foreign-policy concerns. This position is reflected in the statements of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in which the Palestine issue has been addressed through descriptions of the situation of Palestinians, criticism of occupation and compromise, calls for support and resistance, and expressions of sympathy with the Palestinian people. Accordingly, examining the speech acts employed in these statements can provide insight into how the Palestine issue is communicatively and purposively formulated for audiences. The present study therefore seeks to identify and analyze the pattern and functions of speech acts in Khamenei’s statements concerning Palestine. The study focuses on two questions: What is the distribution of the five speech-act categories in the corpus, and what are the dominant illocutionary functions of these acts in the context of the Palestine issue? The study does not claim to measure the actual effects of these statements on public opinion, governmental behavior, foreign policy, or national interests; rather, it focuses on the linguistic data and their communicative functions.
2. Theoretical Framework
The theoretical framework of the study is based primarily on Speech Act Theory developed by John Austin and further systematized by John Searle. Austin distinguished among locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, emphasizing that language is not merely a means of describing reality but also a means of performing actions. The present study concentrates on the illocutionary dimension because the principal analytical concern is the communicative intention performed through linguistic utterances. Searle’s five-part classification provides the main analytical framework: assertives, directives, commissives, declarations, and expressives. Assertives commit the speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition and are used to describe, explain, or evaluate states of affairs. Directives seek to influence the hearer’s behavior by requesting, urging, advising, commanding, or inviting action. Commissives commit the speaker to a future course of action. Declarations bring about institutional or social changes through an utterance when the speaker possesses the required authority and contextual conditions. Expressives communicate psychological states, emotions, attitudes, and evaluations.
In applying this framework, speech acts were not identified merely through lexical or verbal forms. Context, communicative intention, direction of fit, propositional content, speaker-hearer relations, and felicity conditions were considered. Since some utterances may simultaneously perform more than one function, the study identifies a single dominant speech act for each sentence in order to avoid double counting.
3. Methodology
The research adopts an exploratory, descriptive-analytical design. The corpus consists of all statements concerning the Palestine issue published on the official website Khamenei.ir from June 4, 1989, to the end of 2023. The corpus covers a 35-year period and includes 6,704 pages and 1,034 textual links, comprising 11,333 sentences related to Palestine. Data were collected through a census approach, and the sentence was defined as the linguistic unit of analysis, while the dominant speech act was treated as the functional unit of analysis. Each sentence was classified according to Searle’s five categories. Initial coding was conducted by the researchers, after which the coded propositions were reviewed by four university experts in political science, sociology, philosophy, and linguistics. Overlapping cases were reconsidered in terms of their dominant illocutionary purpose and contextual conditions, and a final single category was assigned to each sentence. Thus, the sum of the five categories corresponds exactly to the total of 11,333 sentences. Content validity was examined through expert review and comparison with Searle’s theoretical criteria. However, no independent statistical coefficient of inter-coder agreement was calculated; consequently, the quantitative findings should be interpreted within the framework of the coding and content-validation procedures employed.
4. Results & Discussion
The findings indicate a clear predominance of assertive speech acts. Of the 11,333 sentences, 7,208 (63.60%) were classified as assertives, 2,364 (20.86%) as directives, 1,625 (14.34%) as expressives, 132 (1.16%) as commissives, and 4 (0.04%) as declarations. The dominance of assertives indicates that the principal communicative function of the corpus is the description, explanation, interpretation, and evaluation of the Palestine issue. These acts formulate representations of occupation, Palestinian victimhood, the role of political actors, and the nature of the Israeli regime. In a number of cases, assertive utterances also contain evaluative and emotional elements, demonstrating that the boundaries between speech-act functions may be pragmatically overlapping even though only one dominant act was coded. Directives constitute the second most frequent category, accounting for 20.86% of the corpus. Their frequency demonstrates a substantial action-oriented dimension in the discourse. Calls for supporting Palestinians and resistance, opposing compromise, preventing assistance to Israel, and encouraging Muslim governments and peoples to respond to developments in Palestine illustrate how descriptions and evaluations of the situation are frequently accompanied by calls for action. Thus, the discourse can be understood as establishing a relationship between representing a particular state of affairs and directing audiences toward a desired response. Expressives, with 14.34%, occupy the third position. They include expressions of sympathy, grief, hope, admiration, anger, and negative evaluation. Through these acts, Palestinians and resistance are positively evaluated, while Israel is frequently associated with negative moral and emotional evaluations. Expressives therefore contribute to the affective dimension of the discourse and help communicate the speaker’s attitudes toward the represented events and actors. Nevertheless, their frequency alone cannot establish emotional influence on audiences.
Commissives account for only 1.16% of the corpus. Their examples include commitments to maintaining support for Palestine and resistance and statements concerning future courses of action. Declarations are the least frequent category, with only 4 instances (0.04%). This low frequency is consistent with Searle’s definition of declarations, which require specific institutional authority and contextual conditions. Importantly, the low frequency of commissives and declarations cannot be interpreted as evidence of reduced political commitment or foreign-policy flexibility, because speech-act categories describe the illocutionary function of individual utterances rather than macro-level political commitments. The contextual analysis also suggests variation in the communicative functions of speech acts across different periods. Early statements, such as those from 1989, include commissive formulations emphasizing opposition to relations with Israel and support for Palestine. In middle periods, including 1992 and 2020, directives become prominent through calls for action, criticism of compromise, and support for Palestinians. In more recent statements, particularly those from 2023, assertive and directive acts are accompanied by expressions of sympathy for the people of Gaza, condemnation of violence, and calls for assistance to resistance. These differences should be understood as contextual variations in communicative situations rather than as statistical evidence of a longitudinal change in the overall distribution of speech acts.
5. Conclusions & Suggestions
Overall, the findings demonstrate that the speech-act structure of Khamenei’s statements on Palestine is characterized primarily by the interaction of assertion, direction, and expression. Assertives constitute the dominant mechanism for describing and evaluating the Palestine issue; directives transform these representations into calls for reaction, support, and resistance; and expressives provide an affective and evaluative dimension by emphasizing suffering, hope, admiration, and condemnation. Commissives and declarations occur considerably less frequently and perform more limited, context-dependent functions. The significance of the findings therefore lies not merely in the frequency of categories but in the relationship between speech-act type, communicative context, and illocutionary function. At the same time, the findings should not be interpreted as direct evidence of actual effects on public opinion, foreign policy, national interests, or audience behavior, as such claims require independent empirical evidence and complementary research methods. Future studies may complement the present linguistic analysis with audience-oriented research to examine the reception and possible effects of speech acts on public discourse and public attitudes. Comparative research could also examine the speech-act patterns of Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei or compare the Palestine discourse of different political leaders across historical periods. In addition, longitudinal studies based on independently coded annual datasets and formal inter-coder reliability measures could provide a more precise assessment of changes in speech-act distribution over time. Finally, integrating Speech Act Theory with Critical Discourse Analysis could contribute to a deeper understanding of the relationship among linguistic choices, ideological representation, social cognition, and political discourse.