Parliamentary directives in New Zealand and Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract The main aim of the present paper is to compare the realization patterns of directive speech acts produced by the Speaker of the House of Representatives of New Zealand and the Speaker of the House of Representatives of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The paper focuses on head acts only, disregarding modification. Head acts are analyzed and compared in terms of their explicitness and implicitness, as defined in the framework proposed by Vine ( 2004a , 2004b ). Overall results show that explicit head acts were dominant in both data sets. Furthermore, significant differences were noticed in terms of the findings for certain sub-forms of the explicit head acts, such as the imperative form, which is more frequent in parliamentary directives in Serbian, as are performative verbs. Modal verbs were typical of the parliamentary directives in English. The results are discussed in the context of the findings of previous relevant studies.