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‘Today I offer you, and we offer the country a new vision’: The strategic use of first person pronouns in party conference speeches of the Third Way

Kranert, Michael

Authors

Michael Kranert



Abstract

This article aims to fill a gap in the existing research by analysing the construction of leadership and group identity in a corpus of 13 party conference speeches by the party leaders of the German SPD and the British Labour party between 1997 and 2003. The comparative approach chosen will demonstrate the context sensitivity and strategic use of the pronominal self-references. The article will demonstrate how changes of pronominal self-reference in party conference speeches can be understood as strategic changes of footing (Goffman, 1981) to foreground either the voice of the party leader or the voice of the party. It will conclude with the results of an analysis of the combination of pronominal self-references and verb forms construing competence and responsiveness, as suggested by Fetzer and Bull (2012), and demonstrates that these verb forms are used differently in combination with the various forms of self-reference, a fact neglected in their analysis.

Citation

Kranert, M. (2017). ‘Today I offer you, and we offer the country a new vision’: The strategic use of first person pronouns in party conference speeches of the Third Way. Discourse and Society, 28(2), 182-203. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926516685463

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Oct 17, 2016
Online Publication Date Feb 3, 2017
Publication Date Mar 1, 2017
Deposit Date Oct 18, 2016
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Discourse and Society
Print ISSN 0957-9265
Electronic ISSN 1460-3624
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 28
Issue 2
Pages 182-203
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926516685463
Keywords Discourse analysis, political discourse, party conference speeches, contrastive analysis, German, English, Germany, United Kingdom, third way, New Labour, SPD, competence, leadership, footing, political culture, pronominal self-reference, verb semantics
Public URL http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/405884

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