DELTA OF PERSONAL PRONOUNS IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

The intention behind language used by candidates during an election campaign is to persuade voters to vote for a particular political party. The aim of this article is to explore the use of personal pronoun delta: “I/WE а → YOU → THEY” in the speech by Jeremy Corbyn, English Labour Leader (2017) from the critical discourse analysis approach, focusing on their political speech functions. The pronouns ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘you’ and ‘they’ were chosen for the present research due to their presenting three major foci o the speech: the Speaker +Addressee + Opponent (negatively marked), or other than the the first two (positively marked) in political speeches. The third person singular pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’ were not examined because of their the referential function.This paper will investigate the pragmatics of pronominal choice and the way in which politicians construct and convey their own identities and those of their parties and opponents within political speeches. The personal pronouns chosen can be used by speakers to refer to themselves and to others, and to evoke multiple identities of themselves and others, presented from a range of perspectives. The pronominal choices politicians make serve persuasive and strategic political functions. In this paper it has been argued that personal pronouns in political discourse reflect a variety of aspects of the speaker – ethics, education, communicative skills, determination and truth value, and the political culture of the party and the country, the relationship between the party and electors, etc. Some of these features are encoded in the personal pronoun used in the politician’s mode.