Implicature and Speech Acts in Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” : A Pragmatic Analysis

Abstract

Using Grice’s theory of conversational implicature and Searle’s illocutionary taxonomy, this study examines speech acts and implicatures in Taylor Swift’s lyrics for “Love Story.” A qualitative descriptive method is applied to analyse 43 utterances, identifying the song’s implied meanings and communicative functions. The results show that assertive speech acts predominate at 58.1%, followed by directives (30.2%), expressive (25.6%), commissive (11.6%), and declaratives (2.3%); these percentages reflect frequency of occurrence and do not sum to 100% because a single utterance may realize more than one speech act simultaneously. For implicatures, classification follows criteria: Generalized Conversational Implicature (65.1%) conveys meaning understandable without specific background knowledge, whereas Particularized Conversational Implicature (34.9%) depends heavily on context and intertextual references—mainly to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Combined, these pragmatic strategies construct a multi‑layered romantic narrative accessible at both universal and context‑specific levels. This study demonstrates that song lyrics constitute a rich form of pragmatic discourse, in which speech acts and implicatures interact to convey narrative meaning and emotional depth beyond literal expression.