How Members of Parliament Construct Reference: A Contrastive Analysis of Third Person-Referring Expressions in Political Discourse
Naomi Truan
Berlin
Abstract
In this paper, I present an integrated account of how the targets of political discourse can be encoded in third person markers in English, French, and German. I combine a contrastive research design with a qualitative discourse analytic and a quantitative corpus-based perspective with a focus on the newly reconceptualised category of ‘target’. Third person-referring expressions build a heterogeneous class that comprises third person pronouns (he, she, one) and noun phrases (this person, people), but also quantifiers (many, some, etc.) and more complex entities such as relative clauses (those who).
While person deixis has already been widely documented in political discourse, the focus relies mostly on personal pronouns of the first and second person, respectively (Wilson 1990; Pennycook 1994; Duszak 2002; Krizsán 2011). Third person markers, on the other hand, have been largely neglected. This gap is even more surprising since third person patterns occur frequently in political discourse; thus, failing to include them is startling from a quantitative perspective. Moreover, despite their formal heterogeneity, third person markers play an important role in construing an image of the targets, making them key linguistic patterns in “participant discourse profiling” (De Cock 2014).
One of the major claims made in this work is that third person markers, despite having exclusionary status from a grammatical viewpoint, contribute to shaping an image of the targets in political discourse. By systematically and contrastively searching for a limited set of person-referring expressions in British, German, and French parliamentary debates in a diachronic perspective, substantial insights can be gained on the specific function of third person patterns in political discourse across time, culture, and language.
References
De Cock, Barbara. 2014. Profiling Discourse Participants. Forms and functions in Spanish conversation and debates. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Duszak, Anna (ed.). 2002. Us and Others. Social Identities Across Languages, Discourses and Cultures. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Krizsán, Attila. 2011. “The EU is Not Them, But Us!”. The First Person Plural and the Articulation of Collective Identities in European Political Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars.
Pennycook, Alastair. 1994. The politics of pronouns. ELT Journal 48(2). 173–178. doi:10.1093/elt/48.2.173.
Wilson, John. 1990. Politically Speaking. The Pragmatic Analysis of Political Language. Oxford: Blackwell.