1 Introduction

The Iraq War has sparked international debate, and Searle's speech act theory is used to analyze conflicting discourse and reveal the role of language in war.

2 Literature Review

Conflicting discourse is an important object of linguistic research, involving interdisciplinary perspectives. Foreign scholars achieved early results in the 1980s, with the Journal of Pragmatics publishing a special issue exploring conflict types, language domains, cultural sensitivity, and more. Domestic scholars are paying attention to the rise of discourse pragmatics. Ran Yongping provides an overview of research on conflict discourse pragmatics, Zhao Yingling conducts pattern analysis, and Gong Shuangping delves into response strategies, power issues, and more. Chen Chongguo and Dong Baohua study the conflict in the field of online commentary, while Lai Xiaoyu explores the pragmatic effects of family conflict discourse. At present, there is no research on conflicting discourse in war, and this article attempts to fill the gap.

3 Theoretical Framework

In the 1950s, Austin proposed the theory of speech acts, which divided speech acts into three types: speaking, acting, and taking effect, with a particular emphasis on acting. Based on this, Searle proposed four criteria for classifying speech acts: discourse purpose, psychological state, appropriate direction, and propositional content, and classified the agent acts into five categories: exposition, instruction, commitment, expression, and declaration. This article combines the characteristics of the corpus and adds a "prediction" category, totaling six types of speech acts. Scholars such as Strawson, Bach U0026 Harnish, Cohen U0026 Perrault have further enriched and improved the theory of speech acts.

4 Research Design

This study collected and analyzed 379 news reports published by domestic official mainstream media such as People's Daily and Xinhua Daily Telegraph during the Iraq War, and constructed a small corpus containing 741 pieces of verbal information. The research focuses on the four functions of language in war narratives: implementing war actions, describing war processes, organizing war actions, and influencing audience cognition, as well as its relationship with war initiation intentions, procedures, international humanitarian aid, post-war reconstruction, and other issues. The research questions include the types of conflicting discourse, speech acts, their characteristics, and intentions in the Iraq War.

5 Discussions

This chapter summarizes the characteristics of conflicting discourse in the Iraq War from a linguistic perspective and reveals the discourse intentions of all parties involved in the war. The study points out that the current research is relatively superficial in terms of problems and design. It is recommended that future research integrate interdisciplinary knowledge such as international politics and military science, construct a pragmatic framework for conflicting discourse in war, and systematically explore issues of ideology and national interests. Meanwhile, comparing and analyzing the language strategies of the same subject in different wars is also a research direction worth paying attention to.

6 Conclusion

On the basis of Searle's categorization of agency behavior, this article introduces the "predictive" speech act type to statistically analyze conflicting discourse from various parties during the Iraq War. Through specific examples, it reveals the hegemonic and authoritarian policies of the United States in war, expands the study of conflicting discourse, and provides reference for subsequent research. However, there are still shortcomings in the research that need to be further deepened.