‘YES, WE CAN’: THE USE OF DEICTIC UTTERANCES IN THE INAUGURAL SPEECH OF PRESIDENT NANA ADDO DANKWA AKUFO-ADDO

Rosemary Gifty Addo-Danquah, Faustina Amponsah, Partey, Alberta Dansoah, Nyarko Ansa, Eric Yeboah

Abstract


The study examines President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo's use of personal pronouns to create different identities and to sway public opinion, and support for a political goal in his inaugural address. The goal of the study is to identify the individual to whom the President is referring when he employs the personal pronoun ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘you’, and ‘we’. The key emphasis of the study is to determine whom the President refers to when he uses the personal pronouns I and me, you, and us from the three-tier analytical framework of Fairclough (1980) thus description, interpretation, and explanation. The results suggest that the pronominal choices and their referent swing greatly depending on the context of the speech. The findings reveal the ideologies that Nana Addo aims to espouse. Again, the findings have far-reaching consequences for inaugural address research as a tool for understanding the relationship between rhetorical substance and style and the characteristics unique to presidential political and social perspectives.

 

Article visualizations:

Hit counter


Keywords


deixis, ideologies, inaugural speech, persuasive, responsibility

Full Text:

PDF

References


Ahnet, B. & Erdogan, B. (2011). Use of first-person pronouns: A corpus-based study of journal articles. Turkey: English Language Teaching Department.

Beard, A. (2000). The language of Politics. London: Routledge.

Branley, N. R. (2001). Pronouns of Politics: The use of Pronouns if the Construction of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in political interviews. Thesis: Australian National University.

Dijk, T. A. V. (2003). The discourse-knowledge interface. In Critical discourse analysis (pp. 85-109). Palgrave.

Erwin L. P. (2015). Deitic Expressions in President Beningno Aquino 111’s Eulogy for the Fallen PNP –SAF Troopers. A stylistic analysis, 3, 30 – 48.

Fairclough, N. (1986). Language and Power. London: London: Longman.

Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and text: Linguistic and intertextual analysis within discourse analysis. Discourse & Society, 3(2), 193-217.

Fairclough, N. (1996). A reply to Henry Widdowson's discourse analysis: a critical view. Language and literature, 5(1), 49-56.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.

Fasulo, A. & Zucchermaglio C. (2002). My selves and I: Identity markers in work meeting talk. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(9), 1119-1144.

Harwood, N. (2005). We do not seem to have a theory… The theory I present here attempts to fill this gap: Inclusive and exclusive pronouns in academic writing. Applied linguistics, 26 (3), 343-375.

Hasan J. M. (2012). A linguistic Analysis of in-group and out-group Pronouns in Hosni Mubarak’s speech. Journal of Basrah Researches: Humanities, 38 (2), 5-24.

Hasan, J. M. (2013). A linguistic analysis of in-group and out-group pronouns in Hosni Mubarak’s speech. Journal of Basrah Researches (Humanities Series), 38(2), 5-24.

Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Macmillan, London.

Makutis, T. (2016). First person pronouns in political speeches: United Nations on situation in Ukraine. (Doctoral dissertation, Thesis: Vilnius University).

Obeng, S. G. (2002). The Politics about Languages. Political Independence with Linguistic Servitude: The Politics about Languages in the Developing World, 7-14.

Odebunmi, A. & Olaniyan, K. (2005). Perspectivization in Fiction: A Deictic Study of Wole Sayinka’s AkeMineo. Journal of Pragmatics, 21, 339-383.

Purwo, B. K. (1984). The categorial system in contemporary Indonesian: Pronouns. Towards a description of contemporary Indonesian, 55-73.

Rosyida, E. (2014). The use of Personal Pronoun as a rhetorical strategy in Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s presidential speech text at the United Nations General Assembly. International seminar.

Sharndama C. E. (2005) Political Discourse: A critical Discourse Analysis of President Muhammadu Buhasr’s inaugural Speech. European Journal of English Language and Linguistics Research, 3, 9 -21.

Sharndama, E. (2016). Discursive strategies in political speech: A critical discourse analysis of selected Inaugural speeches of the 2015 Nigeria's Gubernatorial inaugurals. European Journal of English Language, Linguistics and Literature, 3(2), 15-28.

Trask, R. L. (1999). Key Concept in Language and Linguistics. London: Routledge.

Umar, B. (2013). If I could make it, you too can make it: Personal Pronouns in Political Discourse; A CDA of President Jonathan’s Presidential Declaration speech. International Journal of English linguistics, 3 (6).

Van Dijk T. (2001). Discourse, Ideology and Context, 35 (1-2), 11-40.

Van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Opinions and ideologies in the press. Approaches to media discourse, 21(63).

Wales, K. (1996). Personal pronouns in Present Day English: Cambridge University Press.

Yule, G. (1996). Pragmatics. Oxford University Press.

Zupnik, Y. J. (1994). A pragmatic analysis of the use of person deixis in political discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 21 (4), 339-383.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejlll.v7i2.470

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2023 Rosemary Gifty Addo-Danquah, Faustina Amponsah, Partey, Alberta Dansoah, Nyarko Ansa, Eric Yeboah

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The research works published in this journal are free to be accessed. They can be shared (copied and redistributed in any medium or format) and\or adapted (remixed, transformed, and built upon the material for any purpose, commercially and\or not commercially) under the following terms: attribution (appropriate credit must be given indicating original authors, research work name and publication name mentioning if changes were made) and without adding additional restrictions (without restricting others from doing anything the actual license permits). Authors retain the full copyright of their published research works and cannot revoke these freedoms as long as the license terms are followed.

Copyright © 2017-2023. European Journal of Literature, Language and Linguistics Studies (ISSN 2559 - 7914 / ISSN-L 2559 - 7914). All rights reserved.

This journal is a serial publication uniquely identified by an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) serial number certificate issued by Romanian National Library. All the research works are uniquely identified by a CrossRef DOI digital object identifier supplied by indexing and repository platforms. All the research works published on this journal are meeting the Open Access Publishing requirements and standards formulated by Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003) and  Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003) and can be freely accessed, shared, modified, distributed and used in educational, commercial and non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Copyrights of the published research works are retained by authors.