Pronouns in American Political Speeches

Sažetak

This paper studies personal pronouns and their derived forms as ideological discourse features. The aim is to identify, compare and contrast these pronominal forms within speech acts used in the speeches delivered by two presidential candidates of two ideologically opposed political parties (Speech 1 and Speech 2) to establish whether their syntactic style reflects their ideologi­cal world view, divides or unites the electorate around a com­mon goal as well as whether the speeches fit in the “ideological square” (van Dijk 1998, 2008). The methodology draws on criti­cal discourse analysis and the speech act theory. This analysis first shows the occurrence of personal, possessive and reflexive pronouns and adjectives and changes in their referents within speech acts and verbs and verbal tenses. We concluded that the speeches did not follow the principle of van Dijk’s “ideologi­cal square”, since we did not find the opposition of the collec­tive “us” and “them”. However, the ideological difference was observed in the speakers’ choice of the pronoun “you”, in the division of the electorate and in the number of directives ad­dressed to the audience – a higher number in S1, and, on the other hand, indirect directives and call for cooperation and uni­ty of the whole nation in S2. The ideological opposition was also detectable in their choice of speech acts and verbal forms, i. e. whether the speaker was more prone to promising, both in singular and plural form in S1, which could be interpreted as a populist move, or to stating some wishes in the singular form, suggesting a more cautious approach, as in S2.