Beyond Physical Movement: A Speech Act Analysis of the German Verb Gehen in the Film Good Bye, Lenin!

According to pragmatic theory, the meaning of an utterance is determined not only by its linguistic form but also by the context in which it is produced and interpreted. Although the German verb gehen is traditionally defined as a verb of physical movement, its recurrent use in authentic communication suggests that it fulfils a much broader range of pragmatic functions. Despite extensive semantic and grammatical research on gehen, its role as a speech act resource has received little scholarly attention. This study therefore investigates the pragmatic functions of gehen in the German film Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) through the framework of Searle's Speech Act Theory (1969, 1979). Employing a descriptive qualitative design supported by corpus analysis, occurrences of gehen and its inflected forms were extracted using AntConc and a regular-expression search, followed by a rigorous corpus audit and audio-video verification. Twenty-eight authentic occurrences were retained for analysis. The findings reveal three illocutionary functions: representative (50.0%), directive (25.0%), and expressive (25.0%), whereas commissive and declarative acts were absent. The inflected form geht's emerged as the most frequent construction (35.7%), while 67.9% of all occurrences expressed non-physical pragmatic meanings compared with only 32.1% retaining literal physical movement. Overall, the findings demonstrate that gehen functions not merely as a motion verb but as a multifunctional pragmatic resource whose illocutionary force emerges from communicative context rather than lexical semantics alone. Beyond contributing to German pragmatics, this study illustrates how the speech act analysis of a single high-frequency lexical item offers a productive methodological approach for investigating pragmatic extension in authentic discourse.

Pragmatics; Speech Acts; gehen; Film dialogue; Searle

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