Constructing ecological awareness through illocutionary acts: An eco-pragmatic analysis of Turkish children’s stories

The ongoing global environmental crisis has drawn growing attention to how language participates in shaping ecological consciousness. Fields such as ecolinguistics and eco-pragmatics have shown that language does more than transmit information: it also helps construct ecological values, moral orientations, and attitudes toward the natural world. Children's literature occupies a particularly influential position in cultivating environmental sensitivity from an early age, yet most existing research has concentrated on adult-oriented genres. As a result, the pragmatic strategies through which children's ecological stories build environmental awareness have received limited scholarly attention. This study applies Searle's (1976) taxonomy of illocutionary acts to examine how ten Turkish children's stories with ecological themes employ assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations to construct environmental meanings and guide young readers toward pro-environmental values. The stories were drawn from the Ortak Evimiz Dünya (Our Common Home) collection, published online by the Turkish Ministry of Environment and Urbanization in 2019. A mixed-methods design was adopted, combining qualitative discourse analysis with descriptive frequency analysis to identify both the distribution and the communicative functions of each illocutionary category. The findings indicate that assertives and directives are the most dominant categories, together accounting for more than three quarters of the data, followed by expressives, which foster emotional alignment with ecological themes. Commissives and declarations appear less frequently and serve more specialized narrative and normative functions. Declarations mostly act as borderline narrative declaration performatives. The study contributes to the intersection of eco-pragmatics and children's literature by demonstrating that ecological awareness in these stories is constructed through a layered interplay of knowledge presentation, behavioral guidance, and emotional engagement.