Abstract

In politics, a concession is the act of a losing candidate publicly yielding to a winning candidate after an election after the overall result of the vote has become clear. The present paper finds it is important to trace the concession speeches of the political figures and tries to make a view on the general format of such speeches. So the present paper aims at analyzing the social factor of gender in American concessions socio pragmatically. Then, finding out the way that male and female American politicians use the expressive speech acts. It also aims at investigating the most frequent expressive speech act used by male and female in American concessions. 
The procedures that are followed in this paper are: 1. presenting a theoretical background about sociolinguistics, gender, socio pragmatics and political concessions. 2. Selecting the data, which is the American concession to be analysed socio pragmatically. 3. Making a conclusion based on what have been found in the analysis. 
This paper is limited to analyze gender socio pragmatically according to Searle's classifications of speech acts (1969). The selected data are John Kerry's and Hillary Clinton’s concession speeches after conceding defeat in the US presidential elections.