Commissives as the Type of Preemptive Leadership Practice

The Case of the Israeli PM Tweets on the Israel-Hamas War

Abstract

The presentation explores the pragmatic characteristics of the speech acts content facilitated by Tweets generated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, particularly the function of commissives as preemptive leadership practice in the face of imminent danger. These tweeting practices promote ways of dealing with the war crisis and map the future potentialities, which are an assumed part of future reality.  The study is based on the manually compiled dataset of 141 examples of commissives (including promises and threats) collected between Oct. 7 and 20th Dec. 20 2023. This article analyses commissive illocutionary acts as indicators of collective involvement by readily adopting the ‘we’ orientation. It specifically investigates the patterned correlations among three referential devices of personal deixis and two speech act variables using the Pearson correlation coefficient. A strong positive correlation between the speech act of promises and the “we” pronoun parameter could be found. Even stronger positive correlation between the promise and the “3^rd person” pronoun variable was found. Moreover, there were significant but relatively weak positive correlations between 3^rd person use and threat. The study investigates the occurrence and the potential effects of these variables in the prefiguring of the future in various ways.