THE PRAGMATICS OF COLONIAL DISCOURSE:SPEECH ACTS AND IMPLICATURE IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS

Abstract

This study investigates the pragmatics of colonial discourse in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with a focus on how speech acts and conversational implicatures construct, sustain, and complicate representations of imperial power. Drawing upon Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1979), Grice’s theory of implicature (1975), and politeness/facework frameworks (Brown & Levinson, 1987), the research analyses Conrad’s novella through a qualitative textual methodology supported by corpus-stylistic tools. The findings reveal that Company officials rely on authoritative assertives and bureaucratic euphemisms to normalise violence, while directives and commissives enforce colonial hierarchy through orders, threats, and promises. Kurtz’s eloquence exemplifies expressive and performative rhetoric that seduces and legitimises appropriation, culminating in the ambiguous exclamation “The horror!” which functions as an illocutionary climax. Africans, by contrast, are pragmatically silenced through reported speech and omission, their presence reduced to cries or gestures that generate an implicature of voicelessness. Marlow’s narration further destabilises meaning by flouting conversational maxims, producing ironic implicatures that simultaneously critique and reproduce imperial ideology. Overall, the study concludes that Heart of Darkness enacts colonial power not only thematically but pragmatically: through speech acts that normalise domination, implicatures that obscure accountability, and silences that marginalise the colonised. By bridging postcolonial literary criticism with linguistic pragmatics, this research offers a replicable framework for analysing how language performs power in colonial and postcolonial texts.