Speech acts of #REZIST movement

Abstract

The adoption of Emergency Ordinance no. 13/ 2017 on the evening of January 31st, 2017 prompted the most powerful manifestations of popular protest Romania had witnessed since the Revolution of December 1989. The illocutionary force of slogans such as “Like thieves in the night”, “PSD – the red plague”, “Corruption kills”, and hundreds of other slogans heard or read on placards and widely distributed in the social media, as well as the massive presence of peaceful protesters drew the undivided attention of the media throughout the world. This paper aims to employ pragmatics, combined with methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, in discussing the speech acts which make up the core corpus of the slogans of the #REZIST movement, in view of revealing their contribution to the creation of a positive image of Romania's in the international media.