When headlines shape rights: a pragmatic analysis of the Thai News Agency’s English-Language framing of Thailand’s marriage equality legislation

English-language media coverage of legislative developments surrounding marriage equality has grown considerably in Southeast Asia, with Thailand emerging as a prominent case where public and political discourse has intensified in recent years. This study investigates the types of speech acts employed in English-language news headlines about marriage equality laws in Thailand and examines the communicative functions these patterns reveal about how headlines position the issue for readers. Data were collected from 174 headlines published between 2020 and 2024 across six English-language online media outlets: the Bangkok Post, The Nation, Thai PBS World, Khaosod English, Thailand Business News, and Prachatai English. Searle’s (Citation1969) speech act taxonomy was applied alongside content analysis to classify each headline according to its dominant speech act type. The findings reveal that assertive speech acts were most prevalent (n = 106), followed by expressive (n = 34) and directive (n = 23) acts, while commissive (n = 6) and declarative (n = 5) acts occurred least frequently. These results suggest that English-language headlines predominantly serve an informational and fact-reporting function rather than a persuasive or emotionally driven one. Nevertheless, the notable presence of expressive and directive speech acts indicates that media discourse simultaneously shapes public attitudes and mobilizes social support for marriage equality. Future research could expand the corpus to include other-language headlines for cross-linguistic comparison and examine multimodal dimensions of media framing to yield a more comprehensive understanding of how marriage equality is constructed in public discourse.