“I DECREE AND DECLARE”A SPEECH ACT ANALYSIS OF DIGITAL PROPHETIC DECLARATIONS IN NSPPD MORNING PRAYERS

Abstract

This paper investigates the illocutionary structure of prophetic declaration utterances performed by Pastor Jerry Eze during the New Season Prophetic Prayers and Declarations (NSPPD) morning prayer livestreams on YouTube. Drawing on Searle’s (1969, 1979) taxonomy of illocutionary acts and Hancher’s (1979) concept of multiple illocutionary force, the study examines how declarative speech acts—whose felicity conditions traditionally depend on institutional co-presence—are constructed and legitimized in a digitally mediated, spatially dispersed environment. Discourse analysis of twelve declaration segments sampled from NSPPD broadcasts (March–April 2026) identifies a recurrent five-phase rhetorical architecture, five strategies for constructing felicity conditions, and a pervasive pattern of simultaneous multi-force utterances directed at two distinct audiences—the human congregation and a posited spiritual realm. The paper argues that digital prophetic declarations constitute a novel speech act genre that exploits livestream affordances to construct distributed institutional authority: a form of illocutionary legitimacy assembled across physical absence rather than presupposed by co-presence.

Keywords: speech act theory, illocutionary force, digital pragmatics, prophetic declarations, NSPPD, felicity conditions, religious discourse