English Personal Pronouns as a Manipulation Strategy in Political Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36586/jcl.2.2021.0.44.0001Keywords:
Ideological Influence, Ideological Square concept, Manipulation, Political Discourse, Personal PronounsAbstract
Manipulation is a discursive concept which plays a key role in political discourse by which politicians can impose some impact on their recipients through using linguistic features, most prominent of which are personal pronouns (Van Dijk, 1995). The aim of this study is to investigate how politicians utilize the personal pronouns, namely; We and I and their possessive forms as a tool of manipulating the audience's mind based on Van Dijk's "ideological square" which shows positive-self representation and negative-other representation (Van Dijk,1998:p.69). To this end, American President Donald Trump's 2020 State of the Union speech was chosen to be the data of analysis. Only (8) examples out of (226) extracts of his speech involving the use the personal pronouns along with their indications were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Results reveal that Trump uses these pronouns to exercise an ideological influence on his audience, basically to present himself positively. The study concludes that Trump strategically uses personal pronouns as a functional indication of collectivity, nationalism, and direct/shared responsibility. Findings might help linguists and political analysts to understand how politicians have the ability to exploit the linguistic characteristics in their language to fulfill their ends manipulatively.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
( Received on 10/11/2020 - Accepted on 13/12/2020 - Published on 1/6/2021 )
References
- Barnhill, A. (2014).What is manipulation. In Coons, C., & Weber, M. (Eds.), Manipulation: Theory and practice (pp.50, 72) Oxford University Press.
- Beard, A. (2000). The language of politics. London: Routledge.
- Blass, R. (2005). Manipulation in the speeches and writings of Hitler and the NSDAP from a relevance theoretic point of view. In de Saussure, L., & Schulz, P. (Eds.), Manipulation and Ideologies in the Twentieth Century. Discourse, language, mind (pp.169-190). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
- Bramley, N. R. (2001). Pronouns of politics : The use of pronouns in the construction of “self” and “other” in political interviews (Doctoral dissertation). Australian National University, Australia.
- Danler, P. (2005). Morpho-syntactic and textual realizations as deliberate pragmatic argumentative linguistic tools. In de Saussure, L., & Schulz, P. (Eds.), Manipulation and ideologies in the twentieth century: Discourse, language, mind (pp. 45-60) (Vol. 17). John Benjamins Publishing.
- Handelman, S. (2009). Thought Manipulation: The Use and Abuse of Psychological Trickery. Santa Barbara, California. Greenwood Publishing House.
- Kamil, S. I., & Al-Hindawi, F. H. (2017). The Pragmatics of Manipulation in British and American Political Debates. Anchor Academic Publishing.
- Nordlund, M. (2003). Linguistic Manipulation: An analysis of how Attitudes are Displayed in News Reporting. Retrieved from:
- https://www.divaportal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1026715&dswid=-9436 (7/5/2020).
- Paltridge, B. (2012). Discourse analysis: An introduction(2nd ed.).Bloomsbury Publishing.
- Ponomarenko, E. B. (2013). Linguistic manipulation devices (by the example of English and Russian information texts). GISAP. Philological sciences, (1), 62-64.
- Van Dijk, T. A. (1995).Ideological discourse analysis. In Eija Ventola and Anna Solin (Eds.), Special issue interdisciplinary approaches to discourse analysis (pp. 135-161). University of Helsinki: English Dept.
- Van Dijk, T. A. (2006a).Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & society, 17(3), 359-383.
- Van Dijk, T. A. (2006b).Ideology and discourse analysis . Journal of Political Ideologies, 11(2), 115-140.
- Wilson, J. (1990). Politically Speaking. The Pragmatic Analysis of Political Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
- Yule, G. (1996). Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
