Unveiling Human Rights Discourse: A Comparative Analysis of Searle's and Bach & Harnish's Models of Speech Acts

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (henceforth UDHR) is the first international agreement agreed upon by the countries of the world to establish freedoms and rights. How the articles are detailed using different sorts of verbs, which act in the formula of engagements, is one of the rigorous efforts to systematically clarify the mechanisms of language. Any act in verbal communication has message in itself, so the communication is not only about language but also with act. Speech act is the utterance that happens and act denotes to an action. This study tries to view the different formulas of speech acts which are hired in the articles of UDHR. Searle's classification on one hand, and Bach and Harnish's innovations on the other, are used in this study in order to trace the development of the different use of speech acts and their effects on the power of each article. This study finds that speech acts theories (SAT) which are applied to UDHR do not only deliver insights on diverse strategies for communicating messages in discourse, but also clarify the dynamics of decoding meanings via speaker-hearer shared knowledge. However, the study concludes that SATs place too much weight on speaker’s intention, literal and non-literalness of utterances at the expense of other forces in communication.