Research Output
‘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
  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.

  • Type:

    Article

  • Date:

    03 February 2017

  • Publication Status:

    Published

  • DOI:

    10.1177/0957926516685463

  • Cross Ref:

    10.1177/0957926516685463

  • ISSN:

    0957-9265

  • Library of Congress:

    JA Political science (General)

  • Dewey Decimal Classification:

    320 Political science

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

Authors

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

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