“If I Could Make It, You Too Can Make It!” Personal Pronouns in Political Discourse: A CDA of President Jonathan’s Presidential Declaration Speech

Abstract

AbstractsThis paper attempts to use Critical Discourse Analysis to unravel the complex webs of political associations and identities that go into political speeches of Nigerian presidents using one as a model. Nigeria has always been plagued by leadership problems and a lack of critical appreciation of crises of interests that abound in our political sphere. This article aims to offer a linguistic evaluation of a given political discourse in Nigeria in the mode of close engagement with the constructions and context of the discourse. It shows how personal pronouns are used by President Jonathan in his presidential declaration of interest speech to construct various identities and to transpose sentiments and sympathies in order to probably promote a political agenda. The use of Fairclough's (1989) three-tier analytical framework, i.e., description, interpretation and explanation helps to reconstruct the import and real ideological thrust of the speech. The description level shows the linguistic associations, the interpretation level, the pragmatic and intertexual, while the explanation level shows how the socio-cultural practices in the Nigerian society are drawn upon to reflect in these two in a dialectical cycle. In essence, this study, in a systematic way, shows in general how ideologies in the status quo are (or can be) sustained and reproduced by discursively supplanting the consciousness of the people. The pronouns used in the speech end up creating identities that foster the president's political interest and sustain the state of affairs while at the same time mystifying the real class and power struggle at the political center.

The Central Pronouns in Nigeria’s 2015 Presidential Debate: A Grammatical Analysis

“…Whereas Hamdauoi's (2015) pragmatics-based analysis of the persuasive power of person deixis in Obama's speeches reveals nineteen pronouns, only the pronoun we was focused upon because it was the most recurring. Bello (2013) analyses President Goodluck Jonathan's 1831-word declaration of interest speech using Fairclough's (1998) model of CDA and reports that politicians use pronouns to position themselves and others. On the subject of political discourse, van Dijk (1997) points out that syntactic style is politically manipulated and that deictic pronouns are particularly used to denote political polarisation.…”

Pronouns and Ideology in Newspaper Discourse

“…In addition, pronoun (we) was used to serve political purposes of earning trust. This stands for Bello's (2013) and David & Dumanig's (2011) results that the use of 'we' creates multi-faceted dimensions and groupings all serving different political purposes such as earning trust. The KG newspaper focused on presenting direct quotations of the members of U.S. government which consist of the frequent use of pronoun (we) to show the solidarity and consistency among them as well as authority and communality.…”

“…Through the use of pronouns, the KG newspaper showed its bias towards the U.S. government and the extension of its forces' presence in Iraq for serving socio-political agendas of KRG. This concedes with Bello's (2013) interpretation that the use of pronouns is not a mere anaphoric or deictic reference, but they are used to position self and others within the purview of political interests and associations.…”

“…It is a fact that the role of pronouns, especially personal and possessive pronouns, in representing socio-political ideologies is not new as it has been studied extensively in relation to political discourse (Bello, 2013;De Fina, 1995;Grigoletto, 2002;Hasan, 2013;Muqit, 2012;Sotillo & Wang-Gempp, 2004). These studies focused on analyzing the ideological use of pronouns in the political discourse through examining how political actors use and articulate the personal pronouns in their speeches to imply various socio-political ideologies.…”

The Representation of Joko Widodo’s Figure in the Jakarta Post

“…Specifically, the Jakarta Post employs personal deixis. Personal deixis is chosen since it helps construct the social relationship (Bello, 2013), which in this case the relation between the Jakarta Post and Jokowi, especially through the use of deixis 'he', 'his', 'they', and 'their'. By employing them, the Jakarta Post suggests that its position is neither close nor distant.…”